TOMVi: A Tool for Overviewing Metadata Visualization

DNA sequencing technology has been improved drastically in the recent decades, which allows comprehensively analyze microbial community and gene expression. Simultaneously with the improvements, many tools and software for much amount of sequence data have been released. These analysis tools/software can produce statistic information. However, to interpret and to find the relationships and/or associations between the information and the experimental condition may be a complex task, especially for non-bioinformaticians. In this article, an open source software TOMVi (Tool for Overviewing Metadata Visualization) which visualized similarity and relationships between the samples corresponding to the experimental conditions was introduced. TOMVi allows researcher to interactively manipulate the composition data in each sample toward to each experimental condition such as location, time-series and others with graphical user interface (GUI), and to visualize the existence and behavior of each OTU. The figure illustrated by this tool can provide an intuitive suggestion but not always correct as statistically, and will be helpful to decide further analyzing tactics. The TOMVi is available at http://github.com/Daisuke-Kyoui/tomvi.