Enhancing genome recovery across metagenomic samples using MAGmax
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Summary
The number of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) is rapidly increasing with the growing scale of metagenomic studies, driving fast progress in microbiome research. Sample-wise assembly has become the standard due to its computational efficiency and strain-level resolution. It requires dereplication, the removal of near-identical genomes assembled in different metagenomic samples. We present MAGmax, an efficient dereplication tool that enhances both the quantity and quality of MAGs through a strategy of bin merging and re-assembly. Unlike dRep, which selects a single representative bin per genome cluster, MAGmax merges multiple bins within a cluster and reassembles them to increase coverage. MAGmax produces more dereplicated, higher-quality MAGs than dRep at 1.6 × its speed and using three times less memory.
Availability and implementation
The MAGmax open source software, implemented in Rust, is available under the GPLv3 license at https://github.com/soedinglab/MAGmax .
