Refining microbial community metabolic models derived from metagenomics using reference-based taxonomic profiling.

ABSTRACT: Characterization of microbial community metabolic output is crucial to understanding their functions. Construction of genome-scale metabolic models from metagenome-assembled genomes (MAG) has enabled prediction of metabolite production by microbial communities, yet little is known about their accuracy. Here, we examined the performance of two approaches for metabolite prediction from metagenomes, one that is MAG-guided and another that is taxonomic reference-guided. We applied both on shotgun metagenomics data from human and environmental samples, and validated findings in the human samples using untargeted metabolomics. We found that in human samples, where taxonomic profiling is optimized and reference genomes are readily available, when number of input taxa was normalized, the reference

SUBMITTER: Majzoub ME 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11406951 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature