2-AIN-506, 2-AIN-252: Seminar in Bioinformatics (2), (4)
Summer 2026
Abstrakt

Jim Shaw, Maximillian G. Marin, Heng Li. High-resolution metagenome assembly for modern long reads with myloasm. Nature biotechnology, 2026.

Download preprint: not available

Download from publisher: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/pmid/41896477/ PubMed

Related web page: not available

Bibliography entry: BibTeX

Abstract:

Long-read metagenome assembly promises complete genomic recovery from 
microbiomes. However, the complexity of metagenomes poses challenges. Here we 
present myloasm, a metagenome assembler for modern long reads such as PacBio HiFi 
and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) R10.4 long reads. Myloasm uses polymorphic 
k-mers to construct a high-resolution string graph and then leverages 
differential abundance for graph simplification. On real-world ONT metagenomes, 
myloasm assembled three times more complete circular contigs than the next-best 
assembler. Myloasm can make ONT and HiFi assemblies comparable. For example, on a 
jointly sequenced gut metagenome, myloasm with ONT assembled more complete 
circular genomes than any assembler with HiFi. Myloasm also recovers previously 
inaccessible within-species diversity. Here, we recovered six complete Prevotella 
copri single-contig genomes from a gut metagenome and eight complete TM7 
(Saccharibacteria) contigs with >93% similarity from an oral metagenome. Overall, 
we show that myloasm outperforms existing long-read metagenome assemblers across 
a range of environments and modern sequencing technologies.