Metagenomic biomarker discovery and explanation

Other free copies

• National Institutes of Health (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)Preprint · Web page
• Harvard University (nrs.harvard.edu)Preprint · Web page
• University of Nebraska–Lincoln (digitalcommons.unl.edu)Preprint · Web page
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (hdl.handle.net)Preprint · Web page
• University of Trento (hdl.handle.net)Preprint · Web page

Abstract

This study describes and validates a new method for metagenomic biomarker discovery by way of class comparison, tests of biological consistency and effect size estimation. This addresses the challenge of finding organisms, genes, or pathways that consistently explain the differences between two or more microbial communities, which is a central problem to the study of metagenomics. We extensively validate our method on several microbiomes and a convenient online interface for the method is provided at http://huttenhower.sph.harvard.edu/lefse/.