Orchestrating Microbiome Analysis with Bioconductor
The expansion of microbiome research has led to the accumulation of interlinked datasets encompassing versatile taxonomic and functional assays. The analysis of increasingly large and heterogeneous multi-modal microbiome data would benefit from unified approaches supporting the design of modular data science workflows through interoperable methods. The Bioconductor project has recently developed an optimized statistical programming framework for multi-assay data integration. Building on this foundation, we introduce a community-developed open source ecosystem for microbiome data science. In contrast to the previous alternatives, the methodology is specifically designed to support joint analysis of hierarchical, interlinked, and heterogeneous multi-table datasets that are increasingly common in modern microbiome research. This data science ecosystem encompasses open data, methods, tutorials, and an active online community. These resources support standardized and reproducible data wrangling, joint analysis, and reporting. We have detailed the functionality and usage in the online book https://microbiome.github.io/OMA, which offers guidance for prospective users and contributors.