UniFrac – An online tool for comparing microbial community diversity in a phylogenetic context

Moving beyond pairwise significance tests to compare many microbial communities simultaneously is critical for understanding large-scale trends in microbial ecology and community assembly. Techniques that allow microbial communities to be compared in a phylogenetic context are rapidly gaining accept...

Celý popis

Uloženo v:
Podrobná bibliografie
Vydáno v:BMC bioinformatics Ročník 7; číslo 1; s. 371
Hlavní autoři: Lozupone, Catherine, Hamady, Micah, Knight, Rob
Médium: Journal Article
Jazyk:angličtina
Vydáno: England BioMed Central 07.08.2006
BMC
Témata:
ISSN:1471-2105, 1471-2105
On-line přístup:Získat plný text
Tagy: Přidat tag
Žádné tagy, Buďte první, kdo vytvoří štítek k tomuto záznamu!
Popis
Shrnutí:Moving beyond pairwise significance tests to compare many microbial communities simultaneously is critical for understanding large-scale trends in microbial ecology and community assembly. Techniques that allow microbial communities to be compared in a phylogenetic context are rapidly gaining acceptance, but the widespread application of these techniques has been hindered by the difficulty of performing the analyses. We introduce UniFrac, a web application available at http://bmf.colorado.edu/unifrac, that allows several phylogenetic tests for differences among communities to be easily applied and interpreted. We demonstrate the use of UniFrac to cluster multiple environments, and to test which environments are significantly different. We show that analysis of previously published sequences from the Columbia river, its estuary, and the adjacent coastal ocean using the UniFrac interface provided insights that were not apparent from the initial data analysis, which used other commonly employed techniques to compare the communities. UniFrac provides easy access to powerful multivariate techniques for comparing microbial communities in a phylogenetic context. We thus expect that it will provide a completely new picture of many microbial interactions and processes in both environmental and medical contexts.
Bibliografie:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ObjectType-Article-2
ObjectType-Feature-1
ISSN:1471-2105
1471-2105
DOI:10.1186/1471-2105-7-371