Adversarial and variational autoencoders improve metagenomic binning

Piera Lindez, P.; Johansen, J.; Sigurdsson, A. I.; Nissen, J. N.; Rasmussen, S.

doi:10.1101/2023.02.27.527078

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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2023.02.27.527078

Adversarial and variational autoencoders improve metagenomic binning

Piera Lindez, P.·Johansen, J.·Sigurdsson, A. I.·Nissen, J. N.·Rasmussen, S.

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Abstract

Assembly of reads from metagenomic samples is a hard problem, often resulting in highly fragmented genome assemblies. Metagenomic binning allows us to reconstruct genomes by regrouping the sequences by their organism of origin, thus representing a crucial processing step when exploring the biological diversity of metagenomic samples. Here we present Adversarial Autoencoders for Metagenomics Binning (AAMB), an ensemble deep learning approach that integrates sequence co-abundances and tetranucleotide frequencies into a common denoised space that enables precise clustering of sequences into microbial genomes. When benchmarked, AAMB presented similar or better results compared with the state-of-the-art reference-free binner VAMB, reconstructing [~]7% more near-complete (NC) genomes across simulated and real data. In addition, genomes reconstructed using AAMB had higher completeness and greater taxonomic diversity compared with VAMB. Finally, we implemented a pipeline integrating VAMB and AAMB that enabled improved binning, recovering 20% and 29% more simulated and real NC genomes, respectively, compared to VAMB with moderate additional runtime. AAMB is freely available at https://github.com/RasmussenLab/VAMB.

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Piera Lindez, P., Johansen, J., Sigurdsson, A. I., Nissen, J. N., Rasmussen, S.. 2023-02-27. Adversarial and variational autoencoders improve metagenomic binning. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.02.27.527078

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