%0 Journal Article %A Neukirchen, Sinje %A Sousa, Filipa L. %T DiSCo: a sequence-based type-specific predictor of Dsr-dependent dissimilatory sulphur metabolism in microbial data %D 2021 %J Microbial Genomics, %V 7 %N 7 %@ 2057-5858 %C 000603 %R https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000603 %K genotype-phenotype association %K comparative genomics %K microbial physiology %K dissimilatory sulphur oxidation %K dissimilatory sulphate reduction %I Microbiology Society, %X Current methods in comparative genomic analyses for metabolic potential prediction of proteins involved in, or associated with the Dsr (dissimilatory sulphite reductase)-dependent dissimilatory sulphur metabolism are both time-intensive and computationally challenging, especially when considering metagenomic data. We developed DiSCo, a Dsr-dependent dissimilatory sulphur metabolism classification tool, which automatically identifies and classifies the protein type from sequence data. It takes user-supplied protein sequences and lists the identified proteins and their classification in terms of protein family and predicted type. It can also extract the sequence data from user-input to serve as basis for additional downstream analyses. DiSCo provides the metabolic functional prediction of proteins involved in Dsr-dependent dissimilatory sulphur metabolism with high levels of accuracy in a fast manner. We ran DiSCo against a dataset composed of over 190 thousand (meta)genomic records and efficiently mapped Dsr-dependent dissimilatory sulphur proteins in 1798 lineages across both prokaryotic domains. This allowed the identification of new micro-organisms belonging to Thaumarchaeota and Spirochaetes lineages with the metabolic potential to use the Dsr-pathway for energy conservation. DiSCo is implemented in Perl 5 and freely available under the GNU GPLv3 at https://github.com/Genome-Evolution-and-Ecology-Group-GEEG/DiSCo. %U https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/mgen/10.1099/mgen.0.000603