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Support submission of metagenomic assemblies generated from co-assemblies #61

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Description

@KateSakharova

Difficulty: Medium

Why this matters: the pipeline submits metagenomic assemblies to ENA (European Nucleotide Archive). A co-assembly is when reads from several sequencing runs are assembled together into one set of contigs, instead of assembling each run on its own. This is common in metagenomics because it can improve results for organisms that are rare in any single sample. Right now the metagenomic_assemblies mode assumes one run per assembly, so there's no way to describe "this assembly came from runs A, B and C together". This is the other half of the co-assembly problem, on the metagenomic assemblies side (see issue # for the equivalent problem on the MAGs/bins side).

Good to know before starting: there's already an open pull request (#66) that implements most of this, it accepts semicolon-separated run accessions and read files, calculates coverage across multiple runs, and registers a stand-in sample that ties the co-assembly back to all its source runs. The task here is to pick that PR up and finish it rather than start from scratch.

Some terms: ENA (European Nucleotide Archive) is the public repository this pipeline submits data to, and Webin is ENA's account and authentication system needed to submit anything (free, self-service registration). Co-assembly is explained above. An "umbrella" or virtual sample is a synthetic ENA sample used to represent data that comes from more than one original sample, since ENA submissions need to point at exactly one sample.

Skills / experience: Nextflow, reading and continuing someone else's in-progress code, nf-test (see the nf-core nf-test testing guide if this is new to you). Familiarity with the concept of genome coverage depth would be helpful.

Suggested approach:

  1. Read the metagenomic_assemblies mode section of docs/usage.md to be familiar with submission process.
  2. Check out the PR Feature: co-assemblies submission with --mode metagenomic_assembly #66 branch and read its description, which already lists what's left to do.
  3. Fix the coverage calculation bug it flags (the multi-run CoverM output has more columns than the single-run case handles).
  4. Help get the PR reviewed and merged.

Activity

  1. ochkalova commented on May 6, 2026

    @ochkalova
    Contributor

    Approximate list of changes to make this possible (hardest case: no coverage provided in the input, no virtual sample is submitted)

    • Modify schemas assets/schema_input_genome.json and assets/schema_input_assembly.json to accept multiple runs.

    ASSEMBLYSUBMIT:

    • Modify meta construction from samplesheet to allow for multiple runs.
    • Make sure COVERM_CONTIG can accept multiple runs.
    • Modify average coverage calculation (file format of COVERM_CONTIG will change)
    • Update CREATE_ASSEMBLY_METADATA_CSV module
    • Implement umbrella sample generation in assembly_uploader tool

    GENOMESUBMIT:

    • Modify meta construction from samplesheet to allow for multiple runs.
    • Make sure COVERM_GENOME can accept multiple reads
    • Modify average coverage calculation (file format of COVERM_CONTIG will change)
    • Update CREATE_GENOME_METADATA_TSV module
    • Make sure genome-uploader can use umbrella samples (should be done by @ochkalova)
  2. changed the title [-]co-assemblies support[/-] [+]Co-assemblies submission support[/+] on Jul 10, 2026
  3. changed the title [-]Co-assemblies submission support[/-] [+]Co-assemblies submission support with mode "mags/bins" and "metagenomic_assemblies"[/+] on Jul 10, 2026
  4. changed the title [-]Co-assemblies submission support with mode "mags/bins" and "metagenomic_assemblies"[/-] [+]Co-assembly submission support for metagenomic_assemblies mode[/+] on Aug 27, 2026
  5. changed the title [-]Co-assembly submission support for metagenomic_assemblies mode[/-] [+]Support submission of metagenomic assemblies generated from co-assemblies[/+] on Aug 28, 2026
  6. removed their assignment
    on Sep 1, 2026
  7. self-assigned this
    on Oct 15, 2026
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