Metagenomics-based signature clustering and interactive visualization analysis

Metagenomics can be seeing as a data sampling of microorganisms genome sequences inhabiting a common environment. Those sequences can further be evaluated to estimate the impact of the presence or absence of these microorganism in the environment. Thus, sequence data allows the identification of the taxonomic and functional signatures available in a environmental sample. These signatures are usually not explored in a integrated manner and the lack of proper environmental metadata limit the data analysis. In this paper we propose an integrated methodology to identify and compare metagenomic signatures, correlating them with environmental factors (when they are available). Given that the hierarchical (tree-structured) data solution are kind of a set of nested clusters, a Bubble Tree visualization (by Javascript) is also provided to guide the exploration of the metagenomic signatures. Additionally, it make it practical and an easy-to-use way to compare several metagenomic samples. As far as we are concerned such data and interactive visualization analysis has never been explored before.