Richard Leggett from Earlham Institute in the UK presented at London Calling 2021 on “Real-time metagenomics with MARTi.” MARTi stands for “Metagenomic Analysis in Real Time.” They developed this workflow for rapid diagnostics. Once they developed MARTi, Leggett and the team realized there are numerous applications for “in situ sequencing.” NanoOK has been available but has computational and hardware demands. MARTi has a dashboard with key community statistics and graphs, including a donut plot, tree view, and dropdowns for taxonomic levels. The plots are updated in real-time. The view of the plots can be customized. There is also a real-time rarefaction curve depicting the accumulation of taxa as the sequencing run progresses. MARTi has features for AMR analysis. For this, the CARD database is used. MARTi can perform a “walk out” analysis to learn about the flanking sequences to the antibiotic resistance gene. Samples can be compared by ticking the boxes you want to compare. MARTi is tablet and mobile-friendly. On the MinION, there is a way to connect to the laptop with the MARTi software. It then uses BLAST with the lowest common ancestor (LCA) or Centrifuge. They also have a version of MARTi on Cyverse. I played with it and love the interactive dashboard and graphing customization options. I may be able to use MARTi in class and for projects.
