Dataset Information

SigTree: A Microbial Community Analysis Tool to Identify and Visualize Significantly Responsive Branches in a Phylogenetic Tree.

ABSTRACT: Microbial community analysis experiments to assess the effect of a treatment intervention (or environmental change) on the relative abundance levels of multiple related microbial species (or operational taxonomic units) simultaneously using high throughput genomics are becoming increasingly common. Within the framework of the evolutionary phylogeny of all species considered in the experiment, this translates to a statistical need to identify the phylogenetic branches that exhibit a significant consensus response (in terms of operational taxonomic unit abundance) to the intervention. We present the R software package SigTree, a collection of flexible tools that make use of meta-analysis methods and regular expressions to identify and visualize significantly responsive branches in a phylogenetic tree, while appropriately adjusting for multiple comparisons.

SUBMITTER: Stevens JR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5512180 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

<i>SigTree</i>: A Microbial Community Analysis Tool to Identify and Visualize Significantly Responsive Branches in a Phylogenetic Tree.

Stevens John R JR Jones Todd R TR Lefevre Michael M Ganesan Balasubramanian B Weimer Bart C BC

Computational and structural biotechnology journal 20170706

Microbial community analysis experiments to assess the effect of a treatment intervention (or environmental change) on the relative abundance levels of multiple related microbial species (or operational taxonomic units) simultaneously using high throughput genomics are becoming increasingly common. Within the framework of the evolutionary phylogeny of all species considered in the experiment, this translates to a statistical need to identify the phylogenetic branches that exhibit a significant c ...[more]

PMID: 28748045

Similar Datasets

Project description:Microorganisms mediating ammonia oxidation play a fundamental role in the connection between biological nitrogen fixation and anaerobic nitrogen losses. Bacteria and Archaea ammonia oxidizers (AOB and AOA, respectively) have colonized similar habitats worldwide. Ammonia oxidation is the rate-limiting step in nitrification, and the ammonia monooxygenase (Amo) is the key enzyme involved. The molecular ecology of this process has been extensively explored by surveying the gene of the subunit A of the Amo (amoA gene). In the present study, we explored the phylogenetic community ecology of AOB and AOA, analyzing 5776 amoA gene sequences from >300 isolation sources, and clustering habitats by environmental ontologies. As a whole, phylogenetic richness was larger in AOA than in AOB, and sediments contained the highest phylogenetic richness whereas marine plankton the lowest. We also observed that freshwater ammonia oxidizers were phylogenetically richer than their marine counterparts. AOA communities were more dissimilar to each other than those of AOB, and consistent monophyletic lineages were observed for sediments, soils, and marine plankton in AOA but not in AOB. The diversification patterns showed a more constant cladogenesis through time for AOB whereas AOA apparently experienced two fast diversification events separated by a long steady-state episode. The diversification rate (γ statistic) for most of the habitats indicated γ(AOA) > γ(AOB). Soil and sediment experienced earlier bursts of diversification whereas habitats usually eutrophic and rich in ammonium such as wastewater and sludge showed accelerated diversification rates towards the present. Overall, this work shows for the first time a global picture of the phylogenetic community structure of both AOB and AOA assemblages following the strictest analytical standards, and provides an ecological view on the differential evolutionary paths experienced by widespread ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms. The emerged picture of AOB and AOA distribution in different habitats provides a new view to understand the ecophysiology of ammonia oxidizers on Earth.

Project description:BACKGROUND: As microbial ecologists take advantage of high-throughput sequencing technologies to describe microbial communities across ever-increasing numbers of samples, new analysis tools are required to relate the distribution of microbes among larger numbers of communities, and to use increasingly rich and standards-compliant metadata to understand the biological factors driving these relationships. In particular, the Earth Microbiome Project drives these needs by profiling the genomic content of tens of thousands of samples across multiple environment types. FINDINGS: Features of EMPeror include: ability to visualize gradients and categorical data, visualize different principal coordinates axes, present the data in the form of parallel coordinates, show taxa as well as environmental samples, dynamically adjust the size and transparency of the spheres representing the communities on a per-category basis, dynamically scale the axes according to the fraction of variance each explains, show, hide or recolor points according to arbitrary metadata including that compliant with the MIxS family of standards developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium, display jackknifed-resampled data to assess statistical confidence in clustering, perform coordinate comparisons (useful for procrustes analysis plots), and greatly reduce loading times and overall memory footprint compared with existing approaches. Additionally, ease of sharing, given EMPeror's small output file size, enables agile collaboration by allowing users to embed these visualizations via emails or web pages without the need for extra plugins. CONCLUSIONS: Here we present EMPeror, an open source and web browser enabled tool with a versatile command line interface that allows researchers to perform rapid exploratory investigations of 3D visualizations of microbial community data, such as the widely used principal coordinates plots. EMPeror includes a rich set of controllers to modify features as a function of the metadata. By being specifically tailored to the requirements of microbial ecologists, EMPeror thus increases the speed with which insight can be gained from large microbiome datasets.

Dataset Information

SigTree: A Microbial Community Analysis Tool to Identify and Visualize Significantly Responsive Branches in a Phylogenetic Tree.

Publications

<i>SigTree</i>: A Microbial Community Analysis Tool to Identify and Visualize Significantly Responsive Branches in a Phylogenetic Tree.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets