Metagenome assembly of high-fidelity long reads with hifiasm-meta

De novo assembly of metagenome samples is a common approach to the study of microbial communities. Current metagenome assemblers developed for short sequence reads or noisy long reads were not optimized for accurate long reads. We thus developed hifiasm-meta, a metagenome assembler that exploits the high accuracy of recent data. Evaluated on seven empirical datasets, hifiasm-meta reconstructed tens to hundreds of complete circular bacterial genomes per dataset, consistently outperforming other metagenome assemblers.