BinaRena

BinaRena facilitates human-guided exploration and refinement of metagenomes to support assembly and curation of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) with improved biological relevance.

Key Features:

• Interactive Visualization: Interactive scatter plots of contigs integrating sequence metrics, coverage profiles, taxonomic assignments, and functional annotations, enabling selection, masking, highlighting, focusing, and searching of contigs.
• Customizable Binning Plans: Edit, inspect, and compare binning plans with quantitative metrics including the silhouette coefficient and adjusted Rand index.
• Real-Time Quality Metrics: Real-time calculation of completeness and contamination for user-selected contigs.
• MAG Assembly and Curation: Support for human-guided assembly and curation of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) to delineate functional and evolutionary guilds within microbial communities.

Scientific Applications:

• Biological Pattern Discovery: Facilitation of discovery and hypothesis generation from complex metagenomes, exemplified by analysis of a tropical peatland dataset.
• Pathogen Isolation: Isolation and curation of pathogenic genomes within closely related populations from gut microbiota of diarrheal human subjects.
• Binning Quality Improvement: Curation of automated binner outputs to improve overall binning quality, demonstrated using a simulated marine dataset.

Methodology:

Manual refinement of metagenomic assemblies using interactive visualization of contigs, real-time completeness and contamination calculations, and quantitative comparison of binning plans via silhouette coefficient and adjusted Rand index.