BioSankey: Visualizing microbial communities and gene expression data over time

Abstract

Metagenomics, RNA-seq, WGS (Whole Genome Sequencing) and other types of next-generation sequencing techniques provide quantitative measurements for single strains and genes over time. To obtain a global overview of the experiment and to explore the full potential of a given dataset, intuitive and interactive visualization tools are needed. Therefore, we established BioSankey, which allows to visualize microbial species in microbiome studies and gene expression over time as a Sankey diagram. These diagrams are embedded into a project-specific HTML page, that contains all information as provided during the installation process. BioSankey can be easily applied to analyse bacterial communities in time-series datasets. Furthermore, it can be used to analyse the fluctuations of differentially expressed genes (DEG). The output of BioSankey is a project-specific HTML page, which depends only on JavaScript to enable searches of interesting species or genes of interest without requiring a web server or connection to a database to exchange results among collaboration partners. BioSankey is a tool to visualize different data elements from single and dual RNA-seq datasets as well as from metagenomes studies.