What's Changed

• Qc reads, assembly are now written in the sample.tsv from the start. This should fix errors of partial writing to the sample.tsv https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/issues/695
• It also allows you to add external assemblies.
• singletons reads are no longer used trough the pipeline.
• This changes the default paths for raw reads and assemblies. assembly are now in Assembly/fasta/{sample}.fasta reads: QC/reads/{sample}_{fraction}.fastq.gz

Seemless update: If you update atlas and continue on an old project. Your old files will be copies. Or the path defined in the sample.tsv will be used.

Co-binning with sub-groups

https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/683

In this new version, Atlas uses binning with co-abundance as default. While binning each sample individually is faster, using co-abundance for binning, by quantifying the coverage of contigs across multiple samples provides valuable insights about contig co-variation.

See also my blog post

Starting with version 2.18, atlas places every sample in a single BinGroup and defaults to vamb as the binner unless there are very few samples. For fewer than 8 samples, metabat is the default binner.

The defaults are fine except when you have many samples (>150) where atlas gives a warning that you should put sour samples in more than one bin group.

Note

Previously each sample was put in its own BinGroup optimized for single-sample binning. Running vamb in those versions would consider all samples, regardless of their BinGroup. Hence updating to v2.18 might cause errors if using a sample.tsv file from an older Atlas version. You can resolve this by assigning a unique BinGroup to each sample.

Link to documentation

Full Changelog: https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/compare/v2.17.2...v2.18.0

Fixes

• Ignore certificate for gtdb_v08 by @mladen5000 in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/674
• Fixed pandas dependency for instrain by @mladen5000 in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/678
• Convert mem_mb value from gb to mb for select rules by @LLansing in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/681
• ci: use micromamba by @SilasK in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/682

Skani

The tool Skani claims to be better and faster than the combination of mash + FastANI as used by dRep I implemented the skin for species clustering. We now do the species clustering in the atlas run binning step. So you get information about the number of dereplicated species in the binning report. This allows you to run different binners before choosing the one to use for the genome annotation. Also, the file storage was improved all important files are in Binning/{binner}/

My custom species clustering does the following steps:

1. Pre-cluster genomes with single-linkage at 92.5 ANI.
2. Re-calibrate checkm2 results.

• If a minority of genomes from a pre-cluster use a different translation table they are removed
• If some genomes of a pre-cluster don't use the specialed completeness model we re-calibrate completeness to the minimum value. This ensures that not a bad genome evaluated on the general model is preferred over a better genome evaluated on the specific model. See also https://silask.github.io/post/better_genomes/ Section 2.
• Drop genomes that don't correspond to the filter criteria after re-calibration

3. Cluster genomes with ANI threshold default 95%
4. Select the best genome as representative based on the Quality score Completeness - 5x Contamination

New Contributors

• @jotech made their first contribution in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/667

Full Changelog: https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/compare/v2.16.3...v2.17.0

Save GTDB v8 in download folder for GTDB v8 Thanky to @strejcem

What's Changed

• fix gene_info.parquet by @SilasK in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/642
• docs: update gene catalog by @SilasK in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/643
• add minimum mapping quality in pileup by @johnne in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/647
• gtdb v8 by @SilasK in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/648

New Contributors

• @johnne made their first contribution in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/647

Full Changelog: https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/compare/v2.15.2...v2.16.1

What's Changed

• Annotate gene catalog with Kegg, CAZy using DRAM
• You can turn off GUNC

Full Changelog: https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/compare/v2.15.1...v2.15.2

What's Changed

• Use Gunc
• New Folder organisation: Main output files for Binning are in the new folder Binning
• Use hdf-format for gene catalogs. Allow efficient storage and selective access to large count and coverage matrices from the genecatalog. (See docs for how to load them) https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/621
• Semibin v. 1.5 by @SilasK in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/622

What's Changed

• Support for checkm2 by @SilasK in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/607

Thank you @trickovicmatija for your help.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/compare/v2.13.1...v2.14.0

What's Changed

• use minimap for contigs, genecatalog and genomes in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/569 https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/577
• filter genomes my self in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/568 The filter function is defined in the config file:

genome_filter_criteria: "(Completeness-5*Contamination >50 ) & (Length_scaffolds >=50000) & (Ambigious_bases <1e6) & (N50 > 5*1e3) & (N_scaffolds < 1e3)"

The genome filtering is similar as other publications in the field, e.g. GTDB. What is maybe a bit different is that genomes with completeness around 50% and contamination around 10% are excluded where as using the default parameters dRep would include those.

• use Drep again in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/579 We saw better performances using drep. This scales also now to ~1K samples
• Use new Dram version 1.4 by in https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/pull/564

Full Changelog: https://github.com/metagenome-atlas/atlas/compare/v2.12.0...v2.13.0