Compared with other research fields, both microbiome and metabolomics data are complicated and have some unique characteristics, respectively. Thus, choosing an appropriate statistical test or method is a very important step in the analysis of microbiome and metabolomics data. However, this is still a difficult task for those biomedical researchers without a statistical background and for those biostatisticians who do not have research experiences in these fields. Graduate students studying microbiome and metabolomics; statisticians, working on microbiome and metabolomics projects, either for their own research, or for their collaborative research for experimental design, grant application, and data analysis; and researchers who investigate biomedical and biochemical projects with the microbiome, metabolome, and multi-omics data analysis will benefit from reading this work.

Because the microbial community is dynamic, an individual’s microbiota at a given time is varied, and many factors, including age, host genetics, diet, and the local environment, significantly change the microbiota. Thus, microbiome researchers have naturally expanded their research to look for insights into the interaction of the microbiome with other “omics”. Metabolites (small molecules) are the intermediate or end products of metabolism. Metabolites have various functions. The microbial-derived metabolites play an important role in the function of the microbiome. Thus, the advancement in microbiome studies is becoming particularly critical for the integration of microbial DNA sequencing data with other omics data, especially microbiome-metabolomics integration.

This unique book addresses the bioinformatic and statistical modelling and also the analysis of microbiome data using cutting-edge QIIME 2 and R software. It covers core analysis topics in both bioinformatics and statistics, which provides a complete workflow for microbiome data analysis: from raw sequencing reads to community analysis and statistical hypothesis testing. It includes real-world data from the authors’ research and from the public domain, and discusses the implementation of QIIME 2 and R for data analysis step-by-step. The data as well as QIIME 2 and R computer programs are publicly available, allowing readers to replicate the model development and data analysis presented in each chapter so that these new methods can be readily applied in their own research. Bioinformatic and Statistical Analysis of Microbiome Data is an ideal book for advanced graduate students and researchers in the clinical, biomedical, agricultural, and environmental fields, as well as those studying bioinformatics, statistics, and big data analysis.

This unique book officially defines microbiome statistics as a specific new field of statistics and addresses the statistical analysis of correlation, association, interaction, and composition in microbiome research. It also defines the study of the microbiome as a hypothesis-driven experimental science and describes two microbiome research themes and six unique characteristics of microbiome data, as well as investigating challenges for statistical analysis of microbiome data using the standard statistical methods. This book is useful for researchers of biostatistics, ecology, and data analysts. Presents a thorough overview of statistical methods in microbiome statistics of parametric and nonparametric correlation, association, interaction, and composition adopted from classical statistics and ecology and specifically designed for microbiome research. Performs step-by-step statistical analysis of correlation, association, interaction, and composition in microbiome data. Discusses the issues of statistical analysis of microbiome data: high dimensionality, compositionality, sparsity, overdispersion, zero-inflation, and heterogeneity. Investigates statistical methods on multiple comparisons and multiple hypothesis testing and applications to microbiome data. Introduces a series of exploratory tools to visualize composition and correlation of microbial taxa by barplot, heatmap, and correlation plot. Employs the Kruskal–Wallis rank-sum test to perform model selection for further multi-omics data integration. Offers R code and the datasets from the authors’ real microbiome research and publicly available data for the analysis used. Remarks on the advantages and disadvantages of each of the methods used.

This unique book addresses the statistical modelling and analysis of microbiome data using cutting-edge R software. It includes real-world data from the authors’ research and from the public domain, and discusses the implementation of R for data analysis step by step. The data and R computer programs are publicly available, allowing readers to replicate the model development and data analysis presented in each chapter, so that these new methods can be readily applied in their own research. The book also discusses recent developments in statistical modelling and data analysis in microbiome research, as well as the latest advances in next-generation sequencing and big data in methodological development and applications. This timely book will greatly benefit all readers involved in microbiome, ecology and microarray data analyses, as well as other fields of research.

The book serves as an amalgamation of knowledge and principles used in the area of systems and synthetic biology, and targets inter-disciplinary research groups. The readers from diversified areas would be benefited by the valuable resources and information available in one book. Microbiome projects with efficient data handling can fuel progress in the area of microbial synthetic biology by providing a ready to use plug and play chassis. Advances in gene editing technology such as the use of tailor made synthetic transcription factors will further enhance the availability of synthetic devices to be applied in the fields of environment, agriculture and health. The different chapters of the book reviews a broad range of topics, including food microbiome in ecology, use of microbiome in personalized medicine, machine learning in biomedicine. The book also describes ways to harness and exploit the incredible amounts of genomic data. The book is not only limited to medicine but also caters to the needs of environmentalists, biochemical engineers etc. It will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in life sciences, computational biology, microbiology and other inter-disciplinary areas.

A comparative, holistic synthesis of microbiome research, spanning soil, plant, animal and human hosts.