Visibiome: an efficient microbiome search engine based on a scalable, distributed architecture

BMC Bioinformatics

Software

Syafiq Kamarul Azman¹  Andreas Henschel¹  Muhammad Zohaib Anwar² 

[1] Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE;Department of Environmental Science, Aarhus University, Frederiksborgvej 399, Roskilde, Denmark;

关键词: Microbiome;    Microbial diversity;    Search engine;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12859-017-1763-0

 received in 2017-03-21, accepted in 2017-07-14,  发布年份 2017

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundGiven the current influx of 16S rRNA profiles of microbiota samples, it is conceivable that large amounts of them eventually are available for search, comparison and contextualization with respect to novel samples. This process facilitates the identification of similar compositional features in microbiota elsewhere and therefore can help to understand driving factors for microbial community assembly.ResultsWe present Visibiome, a microbiome search engine that can perform exhaustive, phylogeny based similarity search and contextualization of user-provided samples against a comprehensive dataset of 16S rRNA profiles environments, while tackling several computational challenges. In order to scale to high demands, we developed a distributed system that combines web framework technology, task queueing and scheduling, cloud computing and a dedicated database server. To further ensure speed and efficiency, we have deployed Nearest Neighbor search algorithms, capable of sublinear searches in high-dimensional metric spaces in combination with an optimized Earth Mover Distance based implementation of weighted UniFrac. The search also incorporates pairwise (adaptive) rarefaction and optionally, 16S rRNA copy number correction. The result of a query microbiome sample is the contextualization against a comprehensive database of microbiome samples from a diverse range of environments, visualized through a rich set of interactive figures and diagrams, including barchart-based compositional comparisons and ranking of the closest matches in the database.ConclusionsVisibiome is a convenient, scalable and efficient framework to search microbiomes against a comprehensive database of environmental samples. The search engine leverages a popular but computationally expensive, phylogeny based distance metric, while providing numerous advantages over the current state of the art tool.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2017