ggpicrust2

ggpicrust2 performs analysis and visualization of predicted community-wide pathway abundances from 16S rRNA sequencing data using PICRUSt2 to enable functional profiling of microbial communities.

Key Features:

• Integration with PICRUSt2: Leverages PICRUSt2 (Phylogenetic Investigation of Communities by Reconstruction of Unobserved States) to infer community-wide pathway abundances from 16S rRNA gene data.
• Differential Abundance Analysis: Performs differential abundance analyses on predicted pathway abundances between experimental or clinical groups.
• Visualization Capabilities: Generates visualizations that represent predicted functional profiles and highlight functional signals within microbiome datasets.

Scientific Applications:

• Functional profiling from 16S data: Enables inference of pathway-level functional profiles when shotgun metagenomic sequencing is not available.
• Comparative functional analysis: Tests hypotheses about functional differences across microbial communities and links those differences to health conditions or environmental factors.
• Host–microbiome functional studies: Supports investigations of microbial functional consequences on host health, including inflammation and immune responses, and aids translational research toward microbiome-based therapeutic strategies.

Methodology:

Builds on PICRUSt2 predictions of pathway abundances from 16S rRNA gene data, performs differential abundance analyses on the predicted pathway abundances, and produces visualizations of the resulting functional profiles.