Large scale microbiome profiling in the cloud

Motivation Bacterial metagenomics profiling for metagenomic whole sequencing (mWGS) usually starts by aligning sequencing reads to a collection of reference genomes. Current profiling tools are designed to work against a small representative collection of genomes, and do not scale very well to larger reference genome collections. However, large reference genome collections are capable of providing a more complete and accurate profile of the bacterial population in a metagenomics dataset. In this paper, we discuss a scalable, efficient and affordable approach to this problem, bringing big data solutions within the reach of laboratories with modest resources.