James T Morton, Alexander A Aksenov, Louis Felix Nothias, James R Foulds, Robert A Quinn, Michelle H Badri, Tami L Swenson, Marc W Van Goethem, Trent R Northen, Yoshiki Vazquez-Baeza, Mingxun Wang, Nicholas A Bokulich, Aaron Watters, Se Jin Song, Richard Bonneau, Pieter C Dorrestein, Rob Knight
Integrating multiomics datasets is critical for microbiome research; however, inferring interactions across omics datasets has multiple statistical challenges. We solve this problem by using neural networks (https://github.com/biocore/mmvec) to estimate the conditional probability that each molecule is present given the presence of a specific microorganism. We show with known environmental (desert soil biocrust wetting) and clinical (cystic fibrosis lung) examples, our ability to recover microbe-metabolite relationships, and demonstrate how the method can discover relationships between microbially produced metabolites and inflammatory bowel disease...
December 2019: Nature Methods