Muon: multimodal omics analysis framework

Abstract

Advances in multi-omics technologies have led to an explosion of multimodal datasets to address questions ranging from basic biology to translation. While these rich data provide major opportunities for discovery, they also come with data management and analysis challenges, thus motivating the development of tailored computational solutions to deal with multi-omics data. Here, we present a data standard and an analysis framework for multi-omics -- MUON -- designed to organise, analyse, visualise, and exchange multimodal data. MUON stores multimodal data in an efficient yet flexible data structure, supporting an arbitrary number of omics layers. The MUON data structure is interoperable with existing community standards for single omics, and it provides easy access to both data from individual omics as well as multimodal dataviews. Building on this data infrastructure, MUON enables a versatile range of analyses, from data preprocessing, the construction of multi-omics containers to flexible multi-omics alignment.