title: MetaQuery: a web server for rapid annotation and quantitative analysis of specific genes in the human gut microbiome.
abstract: Microbiome researchers frequently want to know how abundant a particular microbial gene or pathway is across different human hosts, including its association with disease and its co-occurrence with other genes or microbial taxa. With thousands of publicly available metagenomes, these questions should be easy to answer. However, computational barriers prevent most researchers from conducting such analyses. We address this problem with MetaQuery, a web application for rapid and quantitative analysis of specific genes in the human gut microbiome. The user inputs one or more query genes, and our software returns the estimated abundance of these genes across 1267 publicly available fecal metagenomes from American, European and Chinese individuals. In addition, our application performs downstream statistical analyses to identify features that are associated with gene variation, including other query genes (i.e. gene co-variation), taxa, clinical variables (e.g. inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes) and average genome size. The speed and accessibility of MetaQuery are a step toward democratizing metagenomics research, which should allow many researchers to query the abundance and variation of specific genes in the human gut microbiome.
  
  
  METHODS
  http://metaquery.docpollard.org.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  snayfach@gmail.comS UPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
authors.affiliation: Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology, Gladstone Institutes, and Division of Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco and.
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nayfach
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Fischbach
authors.affiliation: Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology, Gladstone Institutes, and Division of Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco and.
authors.forename: Katherine S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Pollard
mesh_terms: D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000382:microbiology; D005243:Feces / Q000382:microbiology; D000069196:Gastrointestinal Microbiome / Q000235:genetics*; D005798:Genes, Bacterial; D006801:Humans; D015212:Inflammatory Bowel Diseases / Q000382:microbiology; D020407:Internet; D056186:Metagenomics / Q000379:methods*; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D012984:Software