PNNL

Abstract

Soil microbiomes are heterogeneous, complex microbial communities. Metagenomic analysis is generating vast amounts of data, creating immense challenges in sequence assembly, and analysis. Even with dramatic advances in sequencing technology, soil samples can contain thousands of unique taxa and be more complex than gut microbiomes. At that scale, creating complete genomes requires greater sequence depth, increasing per-sample cost. These challenges hinder the adoption of genome-resolved metagenomic analysis seen in other fields of microbiology, such as the creation of high quality metagenomic assembled genomes and genome scale models. The absence of these resources restricts the scale of future research, limiting hypothesis generation and the predictive modeling of microbial communities. Creating and enabling the use of large, publicly available databases of soil MAGs has the potential to transform scientific insights about soil microbiomes by enabling reuse by other researchers without requiring the computational resources and domain expertise for assembly and binning.