The analysis of these vast amounts of data is complicated by the fact that reconstructing large genomic segments from metagenomic reads is a formidable computational challenge. Even for single organisms, the assembly of genome sequences from sequencing reads is a complex task, primarily due to ambiguities in the reconstruction that are caused by genomic repeats. In metagenomic data, additional challenges arise from the non-uniform representation of genomes in a sample as well as from the genomic variants between the sequences of closely related organisms.
