Welcome.
At heart, SingleM is a tool for profiling shotgun metagenomes. It was originally designed to determine the relative abundance of bacterial and archaeal taxa in a sample. As of version 0.19.0, it can also be used to profile dsDNA phages (see Lyrebird).
It shows good accuracy in estimating the relative abundances of community members, and has a particular strength in dealing with novel lineages. The method it uses also makes it suitable for some related tasks, such as assessing eukaryotic contamination, finding bias in genome recovery, and lineage-targeted MAG recovery. It can also be used as the basis for choosing metagenomes which, when coassembled, maximise the recovery of novel MAGs (see Bin Chicken).
Microbial SingleM has been applied to ~700,000 public metagenomes. The resulting data are available at the Sandpiper companion website.
Documentation can be found at https://wwood.github.io/singlem/
Ben J. Woodcroft, Samuel T. N. Aroney, Rossen Zhao, Mitchell Cunningham, Joshua A. M. Mitchell, Linda Blackall, Gene W Tyson. SingleM and Sandpiper: Robust microbial taxonomic profiles from metagenomic data. bioRxiv 2024.01.30.578060; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.30.578060.
Raphael Eisenhofer, Antton Alberdi, Ben J. Woodcroft, 2024. Large-scale estimation of bacterial and archaeal DNA prevalence in metagenomes reveals biome-specific patterns. bioRxiv, pp.2024-05; https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.05.16.594470.
Samuel T. N. Aroney, Rhys J. Newell, Gene W. Tyson and Ben J. Woodcroft, 2024. Bin Chicken: targeted metagenomic coassembly for the efficient recovery of novel genomes. bioRxiv, pp.2024-11. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.11.24.625082.
Rossen Zhao, Gene W. Tyson, Ben J. Woodcroft. Lyrebird: a tool for profiling dsDNA phage communities in metagenomic data. (in preparation).