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GTDB-Tk v2: memory friendly classification with the genome taxonomy database
Pierre-Alain Chaumeil1,2, Aaron J Mussig1, Philip Hugenholtz1
1Australian Centre for Ecogenomics, School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.
Summary:
The Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB) and associated taxonomic classification toolkit (GTDB-Tk) have been widely adopted by the microbiology community. However, the growing size of the GTDB bacterial reference tree has resulted in GTDB-Tk requiring substantial amounts of memory (∼320 GB) which limits its adoption and ease of use. Here, we present an update to GTDB-Tk that uses a divide-and-conquer approach where user genomes are initially placed into a bacterial reference tree with family-level representatives followed by placement into an appropriate class-level subtree comprising species representatives. This substantially reduces the memory requirements of GTDB-Tk while having minimal impact on classification.
Availability And Implementation:
GTDB-Tk is implemented in Python and licenced under the GNU General Public Licence v3.0. Source code and documentation are available at: https://github.com/ecogenomics/gtdbtk.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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