MinYS: mine your symbiont by targeted genome assembly in symbiotic communities

Most metazoans are associated with symbionts. Characterizing the effect of a particular symbiont often requires to get access to its genome, which is usually done by sequencing the whole community. We present MinYS, a targeted assembly approach to assemble one particular genome of interest from such metagenomic data. First, taking advantage of a reference genome, a subset of the reads is assembled into a set of backbone contigs. Then, this draft assembly is completed using the whole metagenomic readset in a de novo manner. The resulting assembly is output as a genome graph, allowing to distinguish different strains with potential structural variants coexisting in the sample. MinYS was applied to 50 pea aphid re-sequencing samples, with low and high diversity, in order to recover the genome sequence of its obligatory bacterial symbiont, Buchnera aphidicola. It was able to return high quality assemblies (one contig assembly in 90% of the samples), even when using increasingly distant reference genomes, and to retrieve large structural variations in the samples. Due to its targeted essence, it outperformed standard metagenomic assemblers in terms of both time and assembly quality.