Metagenomic biomarker discovery and explanation
Nicola Segata(Harvard University), Jacques Izard(Cancer Research And Biostatistics), Levi Waldron(Harvard University), Dirk Gevers(Broad Institute), Larisa Miropolsky(Harvard University), Wendy S. Garrett(Harvard University), Curtis Huttenhower(Harvard University)
Cited by 16,529Open Access
Abstract
This study describes and validates a new method for metagenomic biomarker discovery by way of class comparison, tests of biological consistency and effect size estimation. This addresses the challenge of finding organisms, genes, or pathways that consistently explain the differences between two or more microbial communities, which is a central problem to the study of metagenomics. We extensively validate our method on several microbiomes and a convenient online interface for the method is provided at http://huttenhower.sph.harvard.edu/lefse/.