Lightweight Metagenomic Classification via eBWT

The development of Next Generation Sequencing has had a major impact on the study of genetic sequences, and in particular, on the advancement of metagenomics, whose aim is to identify the microorganisms that are present in a sample collected directly from the environment. In this paper, we describe a new lightweight alignment-free and assembly-free framework for metagenomic classification that compares each unknown sequence in the sample to a collection of known genomes. We take advantage of the combinatorial properties of an extension of the Burrows-Wheeler transform, and we sequentially scan the required data structures, so that we can analyze unknown sequences of large collections using little internal memory. For the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that is assembly- and alignment-free, and is not based on k-mers. We show that our experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach and the high accuracy even in negative control samples. Indeed we only classify 1 short read on 5,726,358 random shuffle reads. Finally, the results are comparable with those achieved by read-mapping classifiers and by k-mer based classifiers.