Analysing complex metagenomic data with MicroWineBar

An important step in metagenomics studies is to identify which species are present in a sample as well as to compare samples from different environments. Here we introduce MicroWineBar, a graphical tool for analyzing and comparing metagenomics samples. MicroWineBar can visualize the abundances of metagenomics samples in line and bar graphs, as well as analyse the richness and diversity. For a PCA as well as a differential abundance analysis, the abundance data is treated as compositional data and center log-ratio transformed. We use MicroWineBar to analyse two different years of wine fermentation as well as data from a human microbiome study of colorectal cancer. Importantly, MicroWineBar does not require any programming skills, is intuitive and user friendly. MicroWineBar is available at https://github.com/klincke/MicroWineBar and as a python package from the Python Package Index.