Sifting Through Metagenomes With MaxBin

We are learning more about microbes, the single-celled organisms that dominate every ecosystem on Earth. They are responsible for diseases, but they have the ability to feed on plant biomass and convert it into other chemical products.

Exploiting enzymes used in these conversions could potentially revolutionize energy, medicine, environmental remediation and many other fields.

Metagenomics is the emerging technology that enables researchers to read all the individual genomes of a sample microbial community at once. A small sample contains thousands of microbes. Researchers need to analyze the genomes of individual microbial species from a metagenomic sequence.

To make it easier, the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has developed MaxBin, an automated software program for sorting the genomes of individual microbial species from metagenomic sequences, reports Science Daily.

"MaxBin automates the sorting of assembled metagenomic using an expectation-maximization algorithm after the assembly of metagenomic sequencing reads," said Steve Singer, who directs JBEI's Microbial Communities Group. "Previous sorting methods either required a significant amount of work by the user, or required a large number of samples for comparison. MaxBin requires only a single sample and is a push-button operation for users."

MaxBin's algorithims have successfully tested samples from the Human Microbiome Project and from green waste compost.

MaxBin is now being used at JBEI in its efforts to use microbes for the production of advanced biofuels - gasoline, diesel and jet fuel - from plant biomass.

"Applying MaxBin enabled us to identify a number of bacteria that can breakdown cellulose to produce biofuels," Singer said. "This demonstrates that the processes required for recovering genomes from metagenomic datasets can be applied to understanding biomass breakdown in the environment."

The research was published in the journal Microbiome.