BioSankey: Visualization of Microbial Communities Over Time

J Integr Bioinform. 2018 Jun 13;15(4):20170063. doi: 10.1515/jib-2017-0063.

Abstract

Metagenomics provides quantitative measurements for microbial species over time. To obtain a global overview of an experiment and to explore the full potential of a given dataset, intuitive and interactive visualization tools are needed. Therefore, we established BioSankey to visualize microbial species in microbiome studies over time as a Sankey diagram. These diagrams are embedded into a project-specific webpage which depends only on JavaScript and Google API to allow searches of interesting species without requiring a web server or connection to a database. BioSankey is a valuable tool to visualize different data elements from single or dual RNA-seq datasets and additionally enables a straightforward exchange of results among collaboration partners.

Keywords: gene expression; html; microbiome; sankey; visualization.

MeSH terms

  • Computer Graphics*
  • Databases, Factual
  • Genome, Bacterial
  • High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
  • Metagenomics / methods*
  • Microbiota*
  • Software*