MMinte – Predicting metabolic microbial species interactions from community membership
Helena Mendes-Soares
- Audience level:
- Novice
- Category:
- Science
Description
MMinte is a tool for predicting microbial interactions based on the species' metabolism by taking advantage of several modules used in life sciences research.
Abstract
MMinte is an integrated pipeline that allows users to explore the different kinds of pairwise interactions occurring between members of a microbial community under different nutritional conditions. These interactions are predicted for the taxonomic units of interest from as little information as the 16S rDNA sequences commonly obtained in studies describing the species membership of microbial communities. Our application is composed of seven widgets that run sequentially, with each widget utilizing as the default input the file created in the previous widget. While MMinte may be run as a streamlined pipeline, due to its compartmentalized nature, the user is given the ability to better control the full analysis. The user may start the application at any of the seven widgets, as long as the data provided has the adequate structure. Furthermore, the user can access the output files of each widget, and verify the quality of the data produced at each step of the analysis, as well as explore it with alternative tools. The final output is a network diagram representing the interactions between the pairs of species. MMinte is available for download from github.com/mendessoares/MMinte from December 15, 2015.
PyCon 2016 in Portland, OR is a production of the 