Section: New Results

Challenges

Participation to CAMI: de-novo metagenomics assembly competition

Participants : Charles Deltel, Dominique Lavenier, Claire Lemaitre, Pierre Peterlongo.

In metagenome analysis, computational methods for assembly, taxonomic profiling and binning are key components facilitating downstream biological data interpretation. However, a lack of consensus about benchmarking datasets and evaluation metrics complicates proper performance assessment. In this context, we participated to CAMI (Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation), specifically on the assembly section with the Minia pipeline. The CAMI challenge aimed to benchmark programs on datasets of unprecedented complexity and realism. Benchmark metagenomes were generated from  700 newly sequenced microorganisms and  600 novel viruses and plasmids, including genomes with varying degrees of relatedness to each other and to publicly available ones and representing common experimental setups. Across all datasets, our assembly programs performed well for species represented by individual genomes, while performance was substantially affected by the presence of related strains [20].