Soren Heidelbach spoke at the Nanopore Community Meeting 2022 about “Developing new bioinformatics methods to identify modifications from nanopore sequencing.” Heidelbach is from Aalborg University, Denmark. They did metagenomic binning: grouped contigs based on information from k-mers and coverage and also considered modification motifs. Their modification of metagenomic binning was to include base modification as part of the binning process. Heidelbach explained that they wanted this process to happen de novo. They approach this challenge by finding motifs in a complex metagenomic sample. They identify modified and unmodified DNA and map the signal to contigs. Next, they assess which events are significant and improve the process of finding motifs. The method then was tested with E. coli K-12 with and without methylation genes and a Zymo mock community. Heidelbach explained that the next steps will be to use the algorithm for metagenomic binning, improve longitudinal information, and refine motif identification. the tool Heidelbach is developing could be very useful for improved binning of metagenomic sequence data and assembly. I am curious how computationally intensive this process is and if they have a test or released version to use.
