Samuel Aroney

Senior Postdoctoral Researcher (Lecturer, Level B) · Centre for Microbiome Research, Queensland University of Technology

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School of Biomedical Sciences

Queensland University of Technology

Brisbane, Australia

I am a bioinformatician and metagenomics microbiologist at the Centre for Microbiome Research (QUT), working in the Woodcroft group. I build and apply tools for genome-resolved metagenomics: Bin Chicken (targeted co-assembly), CoverM (read-mapping statistics), Aviary (assembly and recovery) and Galah (genome dereplication), and I contribute to SingleM and its Sandpiper community-profile resource.

Applied to global and climate-focused datasets, this work has:

  • identified more than 140,000 previously undescribed bacterial and archaeal species,
  • generated community composition profiles for >750,000 public metagenomes,
  • recovered genomes from >7,000 species in Arctic permafrost wetlands (NSF EMERGE), and
  • supported studies of plastic degradation in insect guts, the Rhizobium–legume symbiosis and chemotaxis in rhizobia.

My earlier training (BSc/Hons, University of Queensland; DPhil, University of Oxford) was in experimental microbiology, focusing on chemotaxis and motility in Rhizobium leguminosarum. I also serve on the QUT School of Biomedical Sciences HDR engagement committee, help administer the Centre’s HPC, and sit on the Microbiome Virtual International Forum (MVIF) Pacific organising committee.

Google Scholar: 1800 citations · h-index 14 · i10-index 15 (as of 2026-11-10; includes merged records)

selected publications

  1. Bin Chicken: targeted metagenomic coassembly for the efficient recovery of novel genomes
    Samuel T. N. Aroney, Rhys J. P. Newell, Gene W. Tyson, and Ben J. Woodcroft
    Nature Methods, 2025
  2. Comprehensive taxonomic identification of microbial species in metagenomic data using SingleM and Sandpiper
    Ben J. Woodcroft, Samuel T. N. Aroney, Rossen Zhao, Mitchell Cunningham, Joshua A. M. Mitchell, Rizky Nurdiansyah, and 2 more authors
    Nature Biotechnology, 2025
  3. CoverM: read alignment statistics for metagenomics
    Samuel T N Aroney, Rhys J P Newell, Jakob N Nissen, Antonio Pedro Camargo, Gene W Tyson, and Ben J Woodcroft
    Bioinformatics, 2025
  4. The Microflora Danica atlas of Danish environmental microbiomes
    C. M. Singleton, T. B. N. Jensen, F. Delogu, K. S. Knudsen, E. A. Sørensen, V. R. Jørgensen, and 65 more authors
    Nature, 2025
  5. Microbiome–metabolite linkages drive greenhouse gas dynamics over a permafrost thaw gradient
    Viviana Freire-Zapata, Hannah Holland-Moritz, Dylan R. Cronin, Sam Aroney, Derek A. Smith, Rachel M. Wilson, and 16 more authors
    Nature Microbiology, 2024