title: CoMet--a web server for comparative functional profiling of metagenomes.
abstract: Analyzing the functional potential of newly sequenced genomes and metagenomes has become a common task in biomedical and biological research. With the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies comparative metagenomics opens the way to elucidate the genetically determined similarities and differences of complex microbial communities. We developed the web server 'CoMet' (http://comet.gobics.de), which provides an easy-to-use comparative metagenomics platform that is well-suitable for the analysis of large collections of metagenomic short read data. CoMet combines the ORF finding and subsequent assignment of protein sequences to Pfam domain families with a comparative statistical analysis. Besides comprehensive tabular data files, the CoMet server also provides visually interpretable output in terms of hierarchical clustering and multi-dimensional scaling plots and thus allows a quick overview of a given set of metagenomic samples.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioinformatics, Institute for Microbiology and Genetics, Georg-August University Göttingen, Goldschmidtstr. 1, 37077 Göttingen, Germany. thomas@gobics.de
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lingner
authors.forename: Kathrin Petra
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: Asshauer
authors.forename: Fabian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Schreiber
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Meinicke
mesh_terms: D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D020407:Internet; D054892:Metagenome; D056186:Metagenomics / Q000379:methods*; D017434:Protein Structure, Tertiary; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein; D012984:Software