xvazquezc
commented
6 years ago What about the approach from here? Brown, C. T., Olm, M. R., Thomas, B. C., & Banfield, J. F. (2016). Measurement of bacterial replication rates in microbial communities. Nature Biotechnology, 34, 1256–1263. [https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3704]()
Many of us are interested in the activity of each MAG in our microbial community. While changes in MAG abundance among samples are interesting, they do not tell the whole story about how the community might be changing during the snapshot in time represented by our sample. One way to estimate the activity of a population of cells making up a MAG would be to examine the difference between the coverage at the origin of replication (ORI) and the relative center of the chromosome. A simple estimate could be made by looking at the difference between splits with the lowest coverage values and highest values within each MAG, estimate the slope and determine who's the boss, but there are a drillion ways to think about/approach this problem.
I understand that Anvio developers have been thinking about this awesome opportunity for a long time and hope that this issue inspires them to work on it immediately. In the mean time, I'll create my own cruddy python script to analyze MAGs so that I can learn how not to do it :)