Finding phylogeny-aware and biologically meaningful averages of metagenomic samples: L2UniFrac.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Metagenomic samples have high spatiotemporal variability. Hence, it is useful to summarize and characterize the microbial makeup of a given environment in a way that is biologically reasonable and interpretable. The UniFrac metric has been a robust and widely used metric for measuring the variability between metagenomic samples. We propose that the characterization of metagenomic environments can be improved by finding the average, a.k.a. the barycenter, among the samples with respect to the UniFrac distance. However, it is possible that such a UniFrac-average includes negative entries, making it no longer a valid representation of a metagenomic community.

Results

To overcome this intrinsic issue, we propose a special version of the UniFrac metric, termed L2UniFra

SUBMITTER: Wei W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10311324 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature