Metabuli classifies metagenomic reads by comparing them to reference genomes. You can use Metabuli to profile the taxonomic composition of your samples or to detect specific (pathogenic) species.
Sensitive and Specific. Metabuli uses a novel k-mer structure, called metamer, to analyze both amino acid (AA) and DNA sequences. It leverages AA conservation for sensitive homology detection and DNA mutations for specific differentiation between closely related taxa.
A laptop is enough. Metabuli operates within user-specified RAM limits, allowing it to search any database that fits in storage. A PC with 8 GiB of RAM is sufficient for most analyses.
A few clicks are enough. A GUI is available here. You can run Metabuli and browse the results with just a few clicks on your PC.
Short reads, long reads, and contigs. Metabuli can classify all types of sequences.

Data description

gtdb.tar.gz (101G):
- GTDB 214.1 (Complete Genome/Chromosome, CheckM completeness > 90 and contamination < 5) + A human genome (T2T-CHM13v2.0)
refseq_virus.tar.gz (8.1G):
- NCBI RefSeq release 223 virus genomes + A human genome (T2T-CHM13v2.0)
refseq_prokaryote_virus.tar.gz (116G):
- RefSeq prokaryote genomes (Complete Genome/Chromosome, 2024-03-26) + RefSeq Virus above + A human genome (T2T-CHM13v2.0)
refseq_release.tar.gz (619G):
- Viral and prokaryotic genomes of RefSeq release 224 and human genome (T2T-CHM13v2.0)
gtdb+virus+human (117G):
- High quality GTDB 220 genomes (Complete Genome/Chromosome, CheckM completeness > 90 and contamination < 5)
- RefSeq viruses (2025-03-07) and human genome (T2T-CHM13v2.0)
- Prokaryotes follow GTDB taxonomy. Viruses and human follow NCBI taxonomy.