Fast and sensitive taxonomic classification for metagenomics with Kaiju

Metagenomics emerged as an important field of research not only in microbial ecology but also for human health and disease, and metagenomic studies are performed on increasingly larger scales. While recent taxonomic classification programs achieve high speed by comparing genomic k-mers, they often lack sensitivity for overcoming evolutionary divergence, so that large fractions of the metagenomic reads remain unclassified. Here we present the novel metagenome classifier Kaiju, which finds maximum (in-)exact matches on the protein-level using the Burrows-Wheeler transform. We show in a genome exclusion benchmark that Kaiju classifies reads with higher sensitivity and similar precision compared with current…

• EC
  European Commission

  Awards: 265933, FP7/2007-2013, 2007-2013, FP7/2007
• NN
  Novo Nordisk
• NN
  Novo Nordisk Fonden
• SF
  Seventh Framework Programme

  Awards: FP7/2007-2013, FP7/2007, 265933, 2007-2013