MetaMap, an interactive webtool for the exploration of metatranscriptomic reads in human disease-related RNA-seq data

Abstract

MotivationThe MetaMap resource contains metatranscriptomic expression data from screening >17,000 RNA-seq samples from >400 archived human disease-related studies for viral and microbial reads, so-called \"metafeatures\". However, navigating this set of large and heterogeneous data is challenging, especially for researchers without bioinformatic expertise. Therefore, a user-friendly interface is needed that allows users to visualize and statistically analyse the data.\n\nResultsWe developed an interactive frontend to facilitate the exploration of the MetaMap resource. The webtool allows users to query the resource by searching study abstracts for keywords or browsing expression patterns for specific metafeatures. Moreover, users can manually define sample groupings or use the existing annotation for downstream analysis. The web tool provides a large variety of analyses and visualizations including dimension reduction, differential abundance analysis and Krona visualizations. The MetaMap webtool represents a valuable resource for hypothesis generation regarding the impact of the microbiome in human disease.\n\nAvailabilityThe presented web tool can be accessed at https://github.com/theislab/MetaMap