title: Community-analyzer: a platform for visualizing and comparing microbial community structure across microbiomes.
abstract: A key goal in comparative metagenomics is to identify microbial group(s) which are responsible for conferring specific characteristics to a given environment. These characteristics are the result of the inter-microbial interactions between the resident microbial groups. We present a new GUI-based comparative metagenomic analysis application called Community-Analyzer which implements a correlation-based graph layout algorithm that not only facilitates a quick visualization of the differences in the analyzed microbial communities (in terms of their taxonomic composition), but also provides insights into the inherent inter-microbial interactions occurring therein. Notably, this layout algorithm also enables grouping of the metagenomes based on the probable inter-microbial interaction patterns rather than simply comparing abundance values of various taxonomic groups. In addition, the tool implements several interactive GUI-based functionalities that enable users to perform standard comparative analyses across microbiomes. For academic and non-profit users, the Community-Analyzer is currently available for download from: http://metagenomics.atc.tcs.com/Community_Analyzer/.
authors: Bio-Sciences R&D Division, TCS Innovation Labs, Tata Research Development & Design Centre, Tata Consultancy Service Ltd., 54-B Hadapsar Industrial Estate, Pune 411 013, Maharashtra, India.
authors: Bhusan K
authors: BK
authors: Kuntal
authors: Tarini Shankar
authors: TS
authors: Ghosh
authors: Sharmila S
authors: SS
authors: Mande
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D054892:Metagenome; D056186:Metagenomics; D064307:Microbiota / Q000235:genetics*; D008957:Models, Genetic; D010802:Phylogeny; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
keywords: Algorithms; Metagenomics; Microbial interactions; Software