Summary: The intrinsic complexity of the microbiota combined with technical variability render shotgun metagenomics challenging to analyze for routine clinical or research applications. In silico data generation offers a controlled environment allowing for example to benchmark bioinformatics tools, to optimize study design, statistical power, or to validate targeted applications. Here we propose assembly_finder and the Metagenomic Sequence Simulator (MeSS), two easy-to-use Bioconda packages, as part of a benchmarking toolkit to download genomes and simulate shotgun metagenomics samples, respectively. Outperforming existing tools in speed while requiring less memory, MeSS reproducibly generates accurate complex communities based on a list of taxonomic ranks and their abundance.

Availability: All code is released under MIT License and is available on https://github.com/metagenlab/MeSS and https://github.com/metagenlab/assembly_finder.

Supplementary Information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btae760DOI Listing

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