CAIM: Coverage-based Analysis for Identification of Microbiome.

Metagenomic coverage is an important index to obtain highly accurate species identification by reducing false positives from whole shotgun metagenomic data.Comparative analyses of CAIM and other bioinformatics tools for species identification on many mock community whole shotgun metagenomic datasets generated by short-read and long-read sequencing and synthetic datasets were performed, showing that CAIM has a very good performance compared with the other tools.Using the metagenomic coverage approach through CAIM improves the predictive power of species biomarkers identified from in stool samples of colorectal cancer and primary liver datasets.