Ray Meta: Scalable de Novo Metagenome Assembly and Profiling

Today is an assembler day !! Sebastien Boisvert notified us that his paper on using Ray assembler on metagenomes is now available from Genome Biology website. We heard raving praise of Ray Meta from C. Titus Brown, and therefore are eager to go through the paper.

I am a reviewer of the Ray Meta paper and I was very impressed with the results they reported (yes, I signed my review, so this shouldnt come as a surprise to them).

Here is the abstract of Ray Meta paper from Genome Biology:

Voluminous parallel sequencing datasets, especially metagenomic experiments, require distributed computing for de novo assembly and taxonomic profiling. Ray Meta is a massively distributed metagenome assembler that is coupled with Ray Communities, which profiles microbiomes based on uniquely-colored k-mers. It can accurately assemble and profile a three billion read metagenomic experiment representing 1,000 bacterial genomes of uneven proportions in 15 hours with 1,024 processor cores, using only 1.5 GB per core. The software will facilitate the processing of large and complex datasets, and will help in generating biological insights on specific environments. Ray Meta is open source and available at http://denovoassembler.sf.net.

Full paper can be accessed here.