Accurate species detection and assessment of functional redundancy in microbial communities

In microbial communities, many different taxonomic groups often exhibit similar metabolic functions. This ecological feature of a community is called Functional Redundancy, and it is thought to be associated with the resistance of the community to disturbances. In this work, we developed a tool to quantify functional redundancy in microbial communities, based on a novel approach to determine the composition of a microbial community, which uses the distribution of metagenomic sequencing reads aligned on reference genomes. The tool was validated using metagenomic analysis of more than 300 anaerobic digestion samples.