MEGAnnotator2: a pipeline for the assembly and annotation of microbial genomes

The reconstruction of microbial genome sequences by bioinformatic pipelines and the consequent functional annotation of their genes' repertoire are fundamental activities aiming at unveiling their biological mechanisms, such as metabolism, virulence factors, and antimicrobial resistances. Here, we describe the development of the MEGAnnotator2 pipeline able to manage all next-generation sequencing methodologies producing short- and long-read DNA sequences. Starting from raw sequencing data, the updated pipeline can manage multiple analyses leading to the assembly of high-quality genome sequences and the functional classification of their genetic repertoire, providing the user with a useful report constituting features and statistics related to the microbial genome. The updated pipeline is fully automated from the installation to the delivery of the output, thus requiring minimal bioinformatics knowledge to be executed.