metaBEETL: high-throughput analysis of heterogeneous microbial populations from shotgun DNA sequences

Environmental shotgun sequencing (ESS) has potential to give greater insight into microbial communities than targeted sequencing of 16S regions, but requires much higher sequence coverage. The advent of next-generation sequencing has made it feasible for the Human Microbiome Project and other initiatives to generate ESS data on a large scale, but computationally efficient methods for analysing such data sets are needed.