slightly difference in bins

[Former user]

Hi Developer,

I am using metabat2/2.12.1, and tested on one sample and repeated to run three times with exact same command: "metabat2 -i /path/contigs.fa -a /path/to/depth.txt -o /path/to/bin -m 1500 -t 10 --unbinned" I can get the exact same number of bins, but the order of bins is different very time, and if looking at the size of each bin, they are comparable but slightly different. May I ask why? Is it due to algorithm that metabat2 used?

Thanks Wang

[Rob Egan]

There is a certain amount of randomness in the algorithm, most of which is eliminated if you specify a non-zero argument to the --seed parameter.