GTDB-Tk v2: memory friendly classification with the genome taxonomy database

The Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB) and associated taxonomic classification toolkit (GTDB-Tk) have been widely adopted by the microbiology community. However, the growing size of the GTDB bacterial reference tree has resulted in GTDB-Tk requiring substantial amounts of memory (similar to 320 GB) which limits its adoption and ease of use. Here, we present an update to GTDB-Tk that uses a divide-and-conquer approach where user genomes are initially placed into a bacterial reference tree with family-level representatives followed by placement into an appropriate class-level subtree comprising species representatives. This substantially reduces the memory requirements of GTDB-Tk while having minimal impact on classification. Availability and implementation GTDB-Tk is implemented in Python and licenced under the GNU General Public Licence v3.0.

Automated summary

This study presents an updated version of GTDB-Tk that uses a divide-and-conquer approach to reduce memory requirements while minimizing classification impact.