Large scale metagenome assembly reveals novel animal-associated microbial diversity

Large-scale metagenome assemblies of human microbiomes have produced a huge catalogue of previously unseen genomic data, but has been applied to only a few of the >66 000 vertebrates on Earth. We generated 4374 metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs) from a large collection of animal gut metagenomes spanning 5 classes: Mammalia, Aves, Reptilia, Amphibia, and Actinopterygii, with 81% of samples from wild animals. We additionally assembled MAGs from 14 existing animal gut metagenome datasets. Moreover, we performed gene-based assembly of our entire metagenome collection to generate a large-scale gene catalogue