Impact of Chimera-less Long Reads on Metagenomics of Human Gut Viromes Treated With Multiple Displacement Amplification

Abstract Background: The ecological and biological features of the indigenous phage community (virome) in the human gut microbiome are poorly understood, possibly due to many fragmented contigs and fewer complete genomes based on conventional short-read metagenomics. Long-read sequencing technologies have attracted attention as an alternative approach to reconstruct long and accurate contigs from microbial communities. However, the impact of long-read metagenomics on human gut virome analysis has not been well evaluated. Results: Here we present chimera-less PacBio long-read metagenomics of multiple displacement amplification (MDA)-treated human gut virome DNA. The method included the development of a novel bioinformatics tool, SACRA (Split Amplified Chimeric Read Algorithm), which efficiently detects and splits numerous chimeric reads in PacBio reads from the MDA-treated virome samples. SACRA treatment of PacBio reads from five samples markedly reduced the average chimera ratio from 72 to 1.5%, generating chimera-less PacBio reads with an average read-length of 1.8 kb. De novo assembly of the chimera-less long reads generated contigs with an average N50 length of 11.1 kb, whereas those of MiSeq short reads from the same samples were 0.7 kb, dramatically improving contig extension. Alignment of both contig sets generated 378 high-quality merged contigs (MCs) composed of the minimum scaffolds of 434 MiSeq and 637 PacBio contigs, respectively, and also identified numerous MiSeq short fragmented contigs ≤500 bp additionally aligned to MCs, which possibly originated from a small fraction of MiSeq chimeric reads. The alignment also revealed that fragmentations of the scaffolded MiSeq contigs were caused primarily by genomic complexity of the community, including local repeats, hypervariable regions, and highly conserved sequences in and between the phage genomes. We identified 142 complete and near-complete phage genomes including 108 novel genomes, varying from 5 to 185 kb in length, the majority of which were predicted to be Microviridae phages including several variants with homologous but distinct genomes, which were fragmented in MiSeq contigs. Conclusions: Long-read metagenomics coupled with SACRA provides an improved method to reconstruct accurate and extended phage genomes from MDA-treated virome samples of the human gut, and potentially from other environmental virome samples.