New ERGO Feature: Microbiome Profile Analysis

Easily analyze your metagenome projects using ERGO by dragging and dropping your BIOM file into ERGO. The BIOM format is the standard interchange format for Metagenome experiments. You can find more information here: http://biom-format.org/index.html. After your BIOM file has been imported into ERGO, it analyzes it and computes some metrics such as total number of otus per sample, the Top 20 OTUs in all samples, and more. You can find this information on the “Overview” tab.

Now that your BIOM file is in ERGO, you can compute the Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA) or Richness Estimates, or a Taxonomic Bar Chart. All of these options are available to you by a click of a button. These analysis are made available by using the wonderful open source software we’ve integrated into ERGO: R, phyloseq and vegan. These packages have been cited thousands of times and are the standard for ecological/metagenome studies. However, using R and these software can be challenging. This is why ERGO exists: to make the best tools available to all researchers.

For PCoA and Richness estimates, ERGO will compute Analysis of Similarities (ANOSIM) to test the significance of group differences. For example, the box plot below is from a study of microbiomes of different body sites in homo sapiens. The Y-Axis of the plot the Shannon Index, a measurement of species richness and evenness. The X-Axis is the groups of samples that are from different body sites. ERGO helpfully provides the significance of the group difference via ANOSIM to be P = 0.002**.

If you’d like to learn more about metagenome/microbiome analysis in ERGO, please feel free to reach out using the form below.