Fairy: fast approximate coverage for multi-sample metagenomic binning.

Background: Metagenomic binning, the clustering of assembled contigs that belong to the same genome, is a crucial step for recovering metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). Contigs are linked by exploiting consistent signatures along a genome, such as read coverage patterns. Using coverage from multiple samples leads to higher-quality MAGs; however, standard pipelines require all-to-all read alignments for multiple samples to compute coverage, becoming a key computational bottleneck.

Results: We present fairy ( https://github.com/bluenote-1577/fairy ), an approximate coverage calculation method for metagenomic binning. Fairy is a fast k-mer-based alignment-free method. For multi-sample binning, fairy can be $>250\times$ faster than read alignment and accurate enough for binning. Fairy is compatible with several existing binners on host and non-host-associated datasets. Using MetaBAT2, fairy recovers $98.5\%$ of MAGs with $>50\%$ completeness and $<5\%$ contamination relative to alignment with BWA. Notably, multi-sample binning with fairy is always better than single-sample binning using BWA ( $>1.5\times$ more $>50\%$ complete MAGs on average) while still being faster. For a public sediment metagenome project, we demonstrate that multi-sample binning recovers higher quality Asgard archaea MAGs than single-sample binning and that fairy's results are indistinguishable from read alignment.

Conclusions: Fairy is a new tool for approximately and quickly calculating multi-sample coverage for binning, resolving a computational bottleneck for metagenomics. Video Abstract.