VirMake: a flexible and user-friendly pipeline for viral taxonomic and functional characterisation from shotgun metagenomic sequencing data

BackgroundBacteriophages (phages) are recognized as key regulators of microbial communities, and it is pivotal to understand viral ecology, diversity, and evolution. However, identification and characterization of phages from shotgun metagenome sequencing pose unique bioinformatic challenges owing to the inherent complexity and scale of the data. ResultsHere, we introduce VirMake, a comprehensive, flexible, and scalable pipeline developed for viral taxonomic and functional analysis of shotgun metagenome data. It enables high-throughput end-to-end processing, assembly, and annotation of metagenomic data, including viral sequence identification, taxonomic and functional annotation, and using a modular framework, allows users to integrate viral analysis at different stages of metagenome data analysis. VirMake can be installed on Linux operating systems that support Conda and is freely available at https://github.com/Rounge-lab/VirMake. Here, we showcase VirMake capabilities using three metagenome datasets of varying sizes (up to 2.9 Tbp), generated from various environments (human gut and water) and using different sample preparation protocols (VLP enrichment and bulk DNA extraction). ConclusionsVirMake enabled robust processing of all datasets, showing viral genome richness, taxonomy and integration status to vary according to sampling environments and laboratory protocols.