Accurate genome relative abundance estimation for closely related species in a metagenomic sample
Metagenomics has a great potential to discover previously unattainable information about microbial communities. An important prerequisite for such discoveries is to accurately estimate the composition of microbial communities. Most of prevalent homology-based approaches utilize solely the results of an alignment tool such as BLAST, limiting their estimation accuracy to high ranks of the taxonomy tree.
closely related species metagenomics alignment similarity genomic similarity