Authors:
Jolanta Kawulok
and
Michal Kawulok
Affiliation:
Silesian University of Technology, Poland
Keyword(s):
Metagenomes, Environmental Classification, CoMeta, Forensic Analysis, Soil Sample.
Abstract:
Metagenome analysis makes it possible to extract essential information on the organisms that have left their
traces in a given environmental sample. In some cases, it is sufficient to determine the origin of an environmental
sample, rather than being able to accurately identify the organisms living there (which may be a challenging
task). For example, in forensic soil analysis, it could be possible to confirm or exclude that a defendant was
present in a certain place by comparing a soil sample acquired from his belongings against the samples derived
from a variety of places (including the suspected place). In this paper, we present a method to identify the
environmental origins of metagenomic reads by comparing them with entire metagenomic collections derived
from reference samples. For this purpose, we exploit our CoMeta program, which allows for fast classification
of metagenome samples, and we apply it to classify the extracted soil metagenomes to various collections of
s
oil samples. The experimental results reported in this paper indicate that the proposed approach is effective,
which allows us to outline the future research pathways to extend and improve our method.
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