Language

English

Publication Date

10-24-2025

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-64916-8

PMID

41136439

PMCID

PMC12552423

PubMedCentral® Posted Date

10-24-2025

PubMedCentral® Full Text Version

Post-print

Abstract

Long-read sequencing has transformed metagenomics and improved the quality of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). However, current binning methods struggle with identifying unknown species and managing imbalanced species distributions. Here, we present LorBin, an unsupervised binner specially designed to reconstruct MAGs in natural microbiomes. LorBin deploys a two-stage multiscale adaptive DBSCAN and BIRCH clustering with evaluation decision models using single-copy genes to maximize MAG recovery. LorBin outperforms six competing binners in both simulated and real microbiomes, including oral, gut, and marine samples. LorBin generated 15-189% more high-quality MAGs with high serendipity and identified 2.4-17 times more novel taxa than state-of-the-art binning methods. Together, LorBin is a promising long-read metagenomic binner for accessing species-rich samples containing unknown taxa and is efficient at retrieving more complete genomes from imbalanced natural microbiomes.

Keywords

Metagenome, Metagenomics, Microbiota, Humans, Cluster Analysis, Gastrointestinal Microbiome, Software, Algorithms, Metagenomics, Computational biology and bioinformatics

Published Open-Access

yes

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