Metagenome strain deconvolution and abundance estimation enabled by low-error long-read DNA sequence

By: Derek M Bickhart, Timothy P.L. Smith, Mick Watson, Mikhail Kolmogorov, Pavel A. Pevzner, Itzhak Mizrahi, Elizabeth Tseng

The rumen microbiome is essential to animal nutrition and health, but current genetics resources to study this community are incomplete. We show that new sequencing technologies can provide better characterization of the community and can generate lineage-resolved, single-contig reference genomes for rumen microbes as well as provide the first assemblies of the rumen protist community. Improved references for the rumen microbes will allow for better modeling of cattle production traits related to rumen health and potentially assist in the reduction of methane emissions by allowing research into the rumen archaea and protist communities.