TaxSEA

TaxSEA performs taxon set enrichment analysis using a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to investigate differential abundance analysis output for alterations in a-priori defined sets of taxa from public databases and literature.

Key Features:

• Taxon Set Enrichment Analysis: TaxSEA applies a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to determine whether predefined sets of taxa show significant alterations in differential abundance results.
• Public Database Integration: TaxSEA integrates taxon sets from BugSigDB, MiMeDB, GutMGene, mBodyMap, BacDive, and GMRepoV2.
• Custom Set Support: Users can incorporate custom taxon sets such as taxonomic groupings.
• Flexible Input: TaxSEA accepts a list of taxonomic identifiers (e.g. species names, NCBI IDs) and a rank (e.g. fold change, correlation coefficient).
• Platform Compatibility: TaxSEA can be applied to any microbiota taxonomic profiling technology including array-based methods, 16S rRNA gene sequencing, shotgun metagenomics, and metatranscriptomics.
• Robustness: In silico assessments demonstrate accuracy across a range of set sizes, and TaxSEA is robust to the choice of differential abundance analysis package.

Scientific Applications:

• Disease Microbiome Analysis: TaxSEA rapidly identifies changes in functional taxon groups corresponding to known associations in diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and type 2 diabetes.
• Literature Contextualization: TaxSEA enables researchers to contextualize findings within the broader microbiome literature to accelerate interpretation of results.
• Microbiome-Host Interaction Studies: TaxSEA advances understanding of microbiome-host and environmental interactions through enrichment-based interpretation.

Methodology:

TaxSEA utilizes a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to analyze differential abundance analysis output against a-priori defined sets of taxa.