VIC Biostat seminar

Multivariate microbiome data analysis

Our recent breakthroughs and advances in culture independent techniques (whole genome shotgun metagenomics, 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing) have dramatically changed the way we can examine microbial communities. But does the hype of microbiome outweigh the potential of our understanding of this ‘second genome’? There are many hurdles to tackle before we are able to identify and compare bacteria driving changes in their ecosystem. In addition to the bioinformatics challenges, current statistical methods are limited to make sense of these complex data that are inherently sparse, compositional and multivariate.

I will discuss some of the topical challenges in microbiome data analysis, and our recent developments to identify microbial signatures using dimension reduction methods. Our methods are implemented in our R toolkit mixOmics dedicated to biological (omics) data integration.