Microbiome Maps: Hilbert Curve Visualizations of Metagenomic Profiles

MotivationAbundance profiles from metagenomic sequencing data synthesize information from billions of sequenced reads coming from thousands of microbial genomes. Analyzing and understanding these profiles can be a challenge since the data they represent is complex. Particularly challenging is their visualization, as existing techniques are inadequate when the taxa number in the thousands. We present a technique for succinct visualization of abundance profiles using a space-filling curve that transforms a profile into an interpretable 2D image. ResultsJasper is a tool for visualizing profiles from metagenomic whole-genome sequencing and 16S, and orders taxa along a space-filling Hilbert curve. The result is a "Microbiome Map", where each position in the image represents the abundance of a single taxon from a reference collection. Jasper can order the taxa in one of two ways, and depending on the ordering, the microbiome maps can highlight "hot spots" of microbes that are either dominant in taxonomic clades or to the biological conditions under study. We use Jasper to visualize samples from the Human Microbiome Project and from a Chronic Kidney Disease study, and discuss a variety of ways in which the microbiome maps can be an invaluable tool to visualize spatial, temporal, disease, and differential profiles. Our approach can create detailed microbiome maps involving hundreds of thousands of microbial reference genomes with the potential to unravel latent relationships (taxonomic, spatio-temporal, functional, and other) that could remain hidden using traditional visualization techniques. The maps can be converted into animated movies that bring to life the dynamicity of microbiomes. AvailabilityJasper will be available as free software from the Mac App Store and biorg.cs.fiu.edu/jasper Supplementary informationSupplementary materials are available at biorg.cs.fiu.edu/jasper