Generation of lineage-resolved complete metagenome-assembled genomes by precision phasing

Abstract Microbial communities in many environments include distinct lineages of closely related organisms which have proved challenging to separate in metagenomic assembly, preventing generation of complete metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). The advent of long and accurate HiFi reads presents a possible means to address this challenge by generating complete MAGs for nearly all sufficiently abundant bacterial genomes in a microbial community. We present a metagenomic HiFi assembly of a complex microbial community from sheep fecal material that resulted in 428 high-quality MAGs from a single sample, the highest resolution achieved with metagenomic deconvolution to date. We applied a computational approach to separate distinct haplotype lineages and identified haplotypes of hundreds of variants across hundreds of kilobases of genomic sequence. Analysis of these haplotypes revealed 220 lineage-resolved complete MAGs, including 44 in single circular contigs, and demonstrated improvement in overall assembly compared to error-prone long reads. We report the characterization of multiple, closely-related microbes within a sample with potential to improve precision in assigning mobile genetic elements to host genomes within complex microbial communities.