BackgroundUntargeted metabolomics of host-associated samples has yielded insights into mechanisms by which microbes modulate health. However, data interpretation is challenged by the complexity of origins of the small molecules measured, which can come from the host, microbes that live within the host, or from other exposures such as diet or the environment.ResultsWe address this challenge through development of AMON: Annotation of Metabolite Origins via Networks. AMON is an open-source bioinformatics application that can be used to annotate which compounds in the metabolome could have been produced by bacteria present or the host, to evaluate pathway enrichment of host verses microbial metabolites, and to visualize which compounds may have been produced by host versus microbial enzymes in KEGG pathway maps.ConclusionsAMON empowers researchers to predict origins of metabolites via genomic information and to visualize potential host:microbe interplay. Additionally, the evaluation of enrichment of pathway metabolites of host versus microbial origin gives insight into the metabolic functionality that a microbial community adds to a host:microbe system. Through integrated analysis of microbiome and metabolome data, mechanistic relationships between microbial communities and host phenotypes can be better understood.
Microbial communities play important roles in environmental and human health systems and can often reach great complexity. In these rich ecosystems, microbes interact with each other, forming relationships based on predator-prey dynamics (Corno et al., 2013), competition for resources (Burkepile et al., 2006), cross-feeding of small compounds, (LaSarre et al., 2017) and other factors. Identifying
BackgroundMicrobiome studies are often limited by a lack of statistical power due to small sample sizes and a large number of features. This problem is exacerbated in correlative studies of multi-omic datasets. Statistical power can be increased by finding and summarizing modules of correlated observations. Additionally, modules provide biological insight as groups of microbes can have relationships among themselves.ResultsTo address these challenges we developed SCNIC: Sparse Cooccurrence Network Investigation for Compositional data. SCNIC is open-source software that can generate correlation networks and detect and summarize modules of highly correlated features. We applied SCNIC to a published dataset comparing microbiome composition in men who have sex with men (MSM) who were at a high risk of contracting HIV to non-MSM. By applying SCNIC we achieved increased statistical power and identified microbes that not only differed with MSM-status, but also correlated strongly with each other, suggesting shared environmental drivers or cooperative relationships among them.ConclusionsSCNIC provides an easy way to generate correlation networks, identify modules of correlated features and summarize them for downstream statistical analysis. Although SCNIC was designed considering properties of microbiome data, such as compositionality, it can be applied to a variety of data types including metabolomics data and used to integrate multiple data types. Using SCNIC allows for the identification of functional microbial relationships at scale while increasing statistical power.
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