Bacterial rose garden for metagenomic SNP-based phylogeny visualization

Area of Science:

• Genomic analysis
• Bioinformatics
• Data visualization

Background:

• Metagenomics presents significant challenges in genomic analysis due to high data complexity.
• Biomedical metagenomics involves numerous samples from diverse body sites and patients, varying over time.
• Data complexity is further increased by sample geography and phylogenetic distances within operational taxonomic units (OTUs).

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a visualization concept for representing multilayer metagenomics data.
• To address the challenges of visualizing complex metagenomic datasets without data loss.
• To enable exploration of taxonomic distances and metadata across samples.

Main Methods:

• Developed a visualization principle named "rose" for multilayer metagenomics data.
• Incorporated data on OTU diversity and sample origin into the visualization.
• Created an interactive data chart projecting distance matrices into a single-dimensional space.

Main Results:

• The "rose" visualization effectively displays phylogenetic distances between OTU representatives.
• The interactive chart allows users to explore variables and relationships within metagenomic data.
• The method preserves information often lost in traditional taxonomic tree representations.

Conclusions:

• The "bacterial rose garden" is a versatile visualization tool for metagenomic big data.
• The approach effectively visualizes interconnectedness of variables in a user-friendly web page.
• This concept offers an original method for metagenomic data representation and sharing.