MMonitor for real-time monitoring of microbial communities using long reads

Real-time monitoring of microbial communities offers valuable insights into microbial dynamics across diverse environments. However, many existing metagenome analysis tools require advanced computational expertise and are not designed for monitoring. We present MMonitor, an open-source software platform for real-time analysis and visualization of metagenomic Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) sequencing data. MMonitor includes two components: a desktop application for running bioinformatics pipelines through a graphical user interface (GUI) or command-line interface (CLI) and a web-based dashboard for interactive result inspection. The dashboard provides taxonomic composition over time, quality scores, diversity indices, and taxonomy-metadata correlations. Integrated pipelines enable automated de novo assembly and reconstruction of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs). To validate MMonitor, we tracked human gut microbial populations in three bioreactors using 16S rRNA gene sequencing and applied it to whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data to generate high-quality annotated MAGs. We compare MMonitor with other real-time metagenomic tools, outlining their strengths and limitations.