Theoretical and Simulation-Based Investigation of the Relationship between Sequencing Effort, Microbial Community Richness, and Diversity in Binning Metagenome-Assembled Genomes

Short-read sequencing with Illumina sequencing technology provides an accurate, high-throughput method for characterizing the metabolic potential of microbial communities. Short-read sequences can be assembled and binned into metagenome-assembled genomes, thus shedding light on the function of microbial ecosystems that are important for health, agriculture, and Earth system processes. The work presented here provides an analytical framework for selecting sequencing effort as a function of genome relative abundance. As such, experimental goals in metagenome-assembled genome creation projects can select sequencing effort based on the rarest target genome as a constrained threshold. We hope that the results presented here, as well as GRASE, will be valuable to researchers planning sequencing experiments.