The growing body of metagenomic data offers the possibility for creating longer consensus assemblies for ecosystems of interest as a community resource. We tested this concept by performing a co-assembly of metagenome and metatranscriptome data from five independent studies of biological soil crust communities in the southwestern United States.  

These are metagenomic assemblies made up from publicly available datasets collected over the course of 2021. See the associated publication for a list of the datasets that went into the final assembly.

Raw sequence reads were assembled with MetaHipMer and the resulting contigs were binned with MaxBin. Quality of the resulting bins were determined with CheckM