Bioinformatics support for the Tubiom community gut microbiome project

, , , , ,
1 ZBIT Center for Bioinformatics, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
2 Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and Eberhart Karls University Tuebingen, International Max Planck Research School From Molecules to Organisms, Tuebingen, Germany
3 CeMeT GmbH, Tübingen, Germany
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2382v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Science and Medical Education
Keywords
human gut microbiome, sequence analysis, 16S amplicon sequencing, software, MEGAN
Copyright
© 2016 Beier et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Beier S, Gorska A, Grupp P, Harbig TA, Flade I, Huson DH. 2016. Bioinformatics support for the Tubiom community gut microbiome project. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2382v1

Abstract

The Tübiom project is a community-based project aimed at constructing a large, representative reference database of human gut microbiome profiles. The goal is to collect 10 000 profiles, along with detailed metadata on each participants health and lifestyle. All samples will be processed using identical sequencing and analysis protocols to ensure comparability. The project has four technical components: sequencing, sequence analysis, data storage and visualisation.

The project website http://www.tuebiom.de allows interested people to learn about the project, order a sampling kit and fill-in the metadata questionnaire. Once a sample as been submitted and processed, a participant can explore the taxonomic profile of their gut microbiome and compare it to the typical profile of different comparison groups.This community-based project also hopes to engage participants in science-propagation, spread knowledge about the gut microbiome and the importance of this area of research.

Here we provide a brief introduction to the Tübiom project and describe the bioinformatics framework that we have developed for it.

Author Comment

This is an article which has been accepted for the "GCB 2016 Conference".