Completeness and contamination were assessed with CheckM v1.1.0 using a lineage-specific workflow.
This symbiont is from a sponge and we have seen previously seen that sponge-associated genomes which are closed (i.e. single, circular contig) have completeness estimates that are below the 90% threshold. For example, we have one completed MAG (2000x coverage, Q>50) for a sponge symbiont and gotten the following completeness estimates:
CheckM: 91 % complete
CheckM2: 81 % complete
Busco v5: 74 % complete
Clearly all pipelines are wrong and substantially underestimate the completeness. I believe this is also the case for this organisms.
We have not be able to reconstruct a better 16S rRNA gene sequence, but phylogenetic placement of the 16S rRNA gene is robust (see Nguyen et al., 2023).