MetLab

MetLab supports experimental design and computational analysis of viral metagenomes to estimate sequencing depth, detect viruses, and characterize viral diversity.

Key Features:

• Experimental Design Support: Estimates necessary sequencing depth for complete species coverage using an adaptation of Stevens' theorem to calculate the probability of coverage.
• Bioinformatics pipelines: Implements pipelines for quality control, assembly of short sequence reads, and taxonomic binning tailored to viral metagenomes.
• Simulation Tool: Simulates metagenomics datasets across various sequencing platforms to test and refine experimental designs.
• Benchmarking and Performance: Benchmarks virus detection capabilities and application speed against existing software.

Scientific Applications:

• Novel virus discovery: Supports identification of novel viruses from metagenomic samples.
• Viral diversity studies: Enables characterization of viral diversity within animal hosts using metagenomic sequencing data.
• Comparative analyses: Facilitates reproducibility and comparability of metagenomics studies across research groups.

Methodology:

Uses an adaptation of Stevens' theorem to estimate probability of species coverage; performs quality-control filtering, assembly of short sequence reads, taxonomic binning, simulation of metagenomic datasets across sequencing platforms, and benchmarking of virus detection and runtime against existing software.