Recent methodological and technological advances enabled the reconstruction of bacterial genomes from complex microbial communities and, to a certain degree, a strain-level characterization. Nevertheless, at present, methods aiming to characterize metagenomes at the strain level are based on either short-read data or hybrid approaches. This motivated us to develop Strainberry, an assembly-based method that separates individual strains in low-complexity metagenomes using uniquely long reads. We benchmarked Strainberry on mock communities and real datasets. It provided strain-resolved assemblies in low-complexity metagenomes, but was also able to unravel a more fine-grained microbial diversity in samples of higher complexity.
For the Symbiose groups.