MetaBIDx: a new computational approach to bacteria identification in microbiomes

Objectives: This study introduces MetaBIDx, a computational method designed to enhance species prediction in metagenomic environments. The method addresses the challenge of accurate species identification in complex microbiomes, which is due to the large number of generated reads and the ever-expanding number of bacterial genomes. Bacterial identification is essential for disease diagnosis and tracing outbreaks associated with microbial infections. Methods: MetaBIDx utilizes a modified Bloom filter for efficient indexing of reference genomes and incorporates a novel strategy for reducing false positives by clustering species based on their genomic coverages by identified reads. The approach was evaluated and compared with several well-established tools across various datasets. Precision, recall, and F1-score were used to quantify the accuracy of species prediction. Results: MetaBIDx demonstrated superior performance compared to other tools, especially in terms of precision and F1-score. The application of clustering based on approximate coverages significantly improved precision in species identification, effectively minimizing false positives. We further demonstrated that other methods can also benefit from our approach to removing false positives by clustering species based on approximate coverages. Conclusion: With a novel approach to reducing false positives and the effective use of a modified Bloom filter to index species, MetaBIDx represents an advancement in metagenomic analysis. The findings suggest that the proposed approach could also benefit other metagenomic tools, indicating its potential for broader application in the field. The study lays the groundwork for future improvements in computational efficiency and the expansion of microbial databases.