Microbial ecology Tools

FastSpar is a C++ implementation of the SparCC algorithm for fast correlation estimation from compositional count data such as microbiome OTU tables.

GTDB-Tk is a software toolkit for assigning objective taxonomic classifications to bacterial and archaeal genomes based on the Genome Database Taxonomy. It is designed to work with recent advances that allow hundreds or thousands of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) to be obtained directly from environmental samples. It can also be applied to isolate and single-cell genomes.

GraPhlAn is a software tool for producing high-quality circular representations of taxonomic and phylogenetic trees. GraPhlAn focuses on concise, integrative, informative, and publication-ready representations of phylogenetically- and taxonomically-driven investigation.

HUMAnN is a pipeline for efficiently and accurately profiling the presence/absence and abundance of microbial pathways in a community from metagenomic or metatranscriptomic sequencing data (typically millions of short DNA/RNA reads). This process, referred to as functional profiling, aims to describe the metabolic potential of a microbial community and its members. More generally, functional profiling answers the question “What are the microbes in my community-of-interest doing (or are capable of doing)?”

Hclust2 is a handy tool for plotting heat-maps with several useful options to produce high quality figures that can be used in publication.

InStrain is a tool for analysis of co-occurring genome populations from metagenomes that allows highly accurate genome comparisons, analysis of coverage, microdiversity, and linkage, and sensitive SNP detection with gene localization and synonymous non-synonymous identification

Program for the taxonomic assignment of high-throughput sequencing reads, e.g., Illumina or Roche/454, from whole-genome sequencing of metagenomic DNA. Reads are directly assigned to taxa using the NCBI taxonomy and a reference database of protein sequences from Bacteria, Archaea, Fungi, microbial eukaryotes and viruses.

Kraken 2 is the newest version of Kraken, a taxonomic classification system using exact k-mer matches to achieve high accuracy and fast classification speeds. This classifier matches each k-mer within a query sequence to the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of all genomes containing the given k-mer. The k-mer assignments inform the classification algorithm. Any assumption that Kraken’s raw read assignments can be directly translated into species or strain-level abundance estimates is flawed. Bracken (Bayesian Reestimation of Abundance after Classification with KrakEN), estimates species abundances in metagenomics samples by probabilistically re-distributing reads in the taxonomic tree. (Lu, Jennifer et al. “Bracken: estimating species abundance in metagenomics data.”)

KrakenTools is a suite of scripts to be used alongside the Kraken, KrakenUniq, Kraken 2, or Bracken programs. These scripts are designed to help Kraken users with downstream analysis of Kraken results.

Metagenome Analysis Software - MEGAN (MEtaGenome ANalyzer) is a new computer program that allows laptop analysis of large metagenomic datasets. In a preprocessing step, the set of DNA reads (or contigs) is compared against databases of known sequences using BLAST or another comparison tool. MEGAN can then be used to compute and interactively explore the taxonomical content of the dataset, employing the NCBI taxonomy to summarize and order the results.

MaxBin2 is a software tool for binning assembled metagenomic sequences into individual genomes using an Expectation-Maximization algorithm based on tetranucleotide frequencies and read coverage information, supporting multiple samples simultaneously.

MetaBAT: A robust statistical framework for reconstructing genomes from metagenomic data.

Computational tool for profiling the composition of microbial communities from metagenomic shotgun sequencing data.

QIIME 2™ is a next-generation microbiome bioinformatics platform that is extensible, free, open source, and community developed.

Bracken (Bayesian Reestimation of Abundance with KrakEN) is a highly accurate statistical method that computes the abundance of species in DNA sequences from a metagenomics sample. Braken uses the taxonomy labels assigned by Kraken, a highly accurate metagenomics classification algorithm, to estimate the number of reads originating from each species present in a sample.

Metagenomic operational taxonomic units (mOTUs) enable high-accuracy taxonomic profiling of known (sequenced) and unknown microorganisms at species-level resolution from shotgun metagenomic or metatranscriptomic data. The method clusters single-copy phylogenetic marker gene sequences from metagenomes and reference genomes into mOTUs to quantify their abundances in meta-omics data with very high precision and recall.