Snipe: highly sensitive pathogen detection from metagenomic sequencing data

Metagenomics data provide rich information for the detection of foodborne pathogens from food and environmental samples that are mixed with complex background bacteria strains. While pathogen detection from metagenomic sequencing data has become an activity of increasing interest, shotgun sequencing of uncultured food samples typically produces data that contain reads from many different organisms, making accurate strain typing a challenging task. Particularly, as many pathogens may contain a common set of genes that are highly similar to those from normal bacteria in food samples, traditional strain-level abundance profiling approaches do not perform well at detecting pathogens of very low abundance levels. To overcome this limitation, we propose an abundance correction method based on species-specific genomic regions to achieve high sensitivity and high specificity in target pathogen detection at low abundance.