Binning_refiner: improving genome bins through the combination of different binning programs

Summary Microbial genomes have recently been reconstructed from metagenomic datasets using binning approaches. Inconsistent binning results are however often observed between different binning programs, likely due to the different algorithms or statistical models used. We present Binning_refiner, a pipeline that merges the results of different binning programs. Our results demonstrated that Binning_refiner can significantly reduce the contamination level of genome bins and increase the total size of contamination-free and ‘good-quality’ genome bins. Binning_refiner is thus an useful tool to improve the quality of genome bins derived from metagenomic data. Availability and Implementation Binning_refiner is implemented in Python3 and is freely available at: https://github.com/songweizhi/Binning_refiner. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.