Did you ever wonder why you can find Tree Lizard 🦎 DNA at the bottom of the ocean? Read-based shotgun metagenomics profiles notoriously include random species that have no business being in a sample. Reads are often short can therefore falsely match surprising organisms. (2/5)

RAT largely removes this issue by rigorously prioritizing taxonomic signals by annotation reliability: Read maps to a MAG? -> assign to the same organism as the MAG. Read maps to an unbinned contig? -> same procedure. Only unmapped reads are annotated directly. (3/5)