Viral Metagenomics 2021: Glossary

Metagenomics is the culture-independent study of the collection of genomes from different microorganisms present in a complex sample.

We call dark matter to the sequences that don’t match to any other known sequence in the databases.

FASTA format does not contain sequencing quality information.

Next Generation Sequencing data is made of short sequences.

With sequence assembly we get longer, more meaningful genomic fragments from short sequencing reads.

In a cross-assembly, reads coming from the same species in different samples are merged into the same scaffold.

Mapping reads back to the cross-assembly we can know which scaffolds/species are present in the samples.

Generally, the higher the number of reads aligned to a scaffold, the higher its abundance in a sample.

Adding more samples with similar species diversity but different abundances increases the binning resolution.

If you got this far, you are a pro.