Further steps in TANGO: Improved taxonomic assignment in metagenomics

Abstract

Motivation: TANGO is one of the most accurate tools for the taxonomic assignment of sequence reads. However, because of the differences in the taxonomy structures, performing a taxonomic assignment on different reference taxonomies will produce divergent results.Results: We have improved the TANGO pipeline to be able to perform the taxonomic assignment of a metagenomic sample using alternative reference taxonomies, coming from different sources. We highlight the novel pre-processing step, necessary to accomplish this task, and describe the improvements in the assignment process. We present the new TANGO pipeline in details, and, finally, we show its performance on four real metagenomic datasets and also on synthetic datasets.Availability: The new version of TANGO, including implementation improvements and novel developments to perform the assignment on different reference taxonomies, is freely available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/taxoassignment/.Contact: © 2013 The Author 2013.