Metabuli classifies metagenomic reads by comparing them to reference genomes. You can use Metabuli to profile the taxonomic composition of your samples or to detect specific (pathogenic) species.

Sensitive and Specific. Metabuli uses a novel k-mer structure, called metamer, to analyze both amino acid (AA) and DNA sequences. It leverages AA conservation for sensitive homology detection and DNA mutations for specific differentiation between closely related taxa.

A laptop is enough. Metabuli operates within user-specified RAM limits, allowing it to search any database that fits in storage. A PC with 8 GiB of RAM is sufficient for most analyses.

A few clicks are enough. Metabuli App is now available here. With just a few clicks, you can run Metabuli and browse the results with Sankey and Krona plots on your PC.

Short reads, long reads, and contigs. Metabuli can classify all types of sequences.

For more details, please see Nature Methods, PDF, bioRxiv, or ISMB 2023 talk.

Please cite: Kim J, Steinegger M. Metabuli: sensitive and specific metagenomic classification via joint analysis of amino acid and DNA. Nature Methods (2024).

Run taxonomic profiling in just a few clicks and explore results with Sankey and Krona plots.

Download the app for your OS here—no separate Metabuli installation needed.

• Taxonomy dump: Shen W, Ren H. TaxonKit: a practical and efficient NCBI Taxonomy toolkit. Journal of Genetics and Genomics (2021).
• FASTA format validation: Edwards R.A. fasta_validate: a fast and efficient fasta validator written in pure C. Zenodo.
• FASTQ format validation: Fonseca N, Manning J. nunofonseca/fastq_utils: 0.25.2. Zenodo.