Hi Everyone!

We work with a lignocellulose-degrading microbial consortia. Within a time-series experiment of an enriched culture, we perform a de novo crossassembly of metatranscriptome reads of four samples using SPAdes assembler and DIAMOND annotation, prior to differential expression analysis, we estimate the metabolic contribution of the individuals by recruitment of few bacterial genomes, surprisevely, there was five genomes almost totally covered by the RNA-seq data! and we decide try to perform a binning (MetaBAT) whit this data. One of the bins reached a 98% of completeness. It should be noted that RNA samples was treated with DNAse and RiboZero. In your opionion, what could be the source of the sequences that contributed to these results? Is the effect by the algorithm more likely than some biological event difficult to circumvent such as the separation of operons in a non-synchronous culture?

Thanks a lot