Towards a microbial network inference and analysis platform

Microbial network inference is an exploratory data analysis technique that predicts links between microbial taxa from repeated measurements of their abundance, thereby constructing networks of interlinked taxa. With the recent increase of sequencing projects that quantify microbial abundances in various environments, there is also a wider interest to build networks to investigate microbial community structure. Despite the large number of microbial network inference tools, there is currently no tool dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of such networks. To gain ecological insights from microbial networks, researchers usually spend more time to analyse than to build them, manually integrating data from different sources to make sense of the predicted links. We therefore propose to develop a microbial network analysis platform that will automatise this task as far as possible to close the gap between microbial network construction and hypothesis formulation.

Keywords:meat products

Disciplines:Microbiology, Systems biology, Laboratory medicine