taxator-tk

taxator-tk assigns taxonomic labels to DNA sequences from metagenomic datasets produced by next-generation sequencing for taxonomic sequence assignment in computational metagenome analysis.

Key Features:

• Fast Approximate Determination: Employs a novel algorithm that rapidly determines evolutionary neighbors based on sequence similarities, accommodating both short and long sequences.
• Precision Across Ranks and Distances: Delivers high precision of taxonomic assignments across taxonomic ranks and a wide range of evolutionary distances.
• Microbial Community Profiling: Profiles microbial communities from metagenomes and identifies members across bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic domains, remaining robust to varying primer binding strengths and marker gene copy-number variation.
• Efficient Parallelized Implementation: Implements a parallelized architecture that can assign approximately 6 Gb of sequence data per day on a 10‑core system using microbial RefSeq as the genomic reference dataset.

Scientific Applications:

• Metagenomic taxonomic assignment: Assigns taxonomy to DNA sequences from random shotgun sequencing to characterize microbial community composition.
• Taxonomic bin reconstruction: Supports reconstruction of taxonomic bins for individual taxa from metagenomic sequence data.

Methodology:

Taxonomic assignments are computed by an algorithm that determines evolutionary neighbors from sequence similarity comparisons against microbial RefSeq, implemented in a parallelized architecture.