UHGG v2.0 released in MGnify

Version 2.0 of the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome (UHGG) catalogue is now available in MGnify, comprising 289,232 prokaryotic genomes clustered into 4,744 species representatives. This is an updated version of the catalogue published by Almeida et al. Nature Biotech (2021), which now includes a further 2,426 metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs) derived from study PRJEB37358 “Recovery of novel prokaryotic genomes associated with metabolic diseases such as T2D and T2D-related comorbidities”, as well as 3,452 isolate genomes from BIO-ML (The Broad Institute-OpenBiome Microbiome Library), which represents the most recent human gut culture collection (Poyet et al. Nature Medicine (2019)). These additional datasets have resulted in 129 new species, and 2135 new strains being added to this v2.0 of the UHGG.

As the landscape of available data is always increasing, we have taken the opportunity to formalise the process of updating this catalogue, allowing us to streamline the generation of further updates in the future. We have made some improvements to the catalogue, such as additional quality filtering steps, including using GUNC (produced by the Bork group at EMBL) to filter out potentially chimeric genomes, and have also standardised the accessioning of genomes to use a prefix of MGYG, and to utilise a .version suffix to indicate changes to the genome sequence. We provide predicted functional annotations for each cluster representative as well as pan-genome data for clusters of more than one genome.

You can go and try out UHGG v2.0 on the MGnify website today, including using our search tools to compare your own gene data or genome(s) data against the catalogue.