HiFiBGC

HiFiBGC leverages an ensemble of assemblies from three HiFi-tailored metagenome assemblers and unmapped reads to identify biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) in PacBio HiFi metagenomes.

Key Features:

• Ensemble Assembly Approach: Combines assemblies from three HiFi-tailored metagenome assemblers to improve BGC recovery by 25%.
• Unmapped Read Analysis: Includes mostly fragmented BGCs identified in reads not represented in the assemblies.
• BGC Identification: Identifies, on average, 78% more BGCs than the top-performing single-assembler-based method.

Scientific Applications:

• Natural Product Discovery: Enables high-throughput identification of BGCs encoding bioactive natural products from complex metagenomes.
• NRPS and PKS Recovery: Improves assembly of complete nonribosomal peptide synthetase and polyketide synthase BGCs that are long and repetitive.
• Metagenome Mining: Facilitates BGC mining from diverse environmental HiFi metagenomic datasets for access to novel natural product diversity.

Methodology:

HiFiBGC is implemented using Python and the workflow manager Snakemake.