Hilbert Curve Visualizations of Metagenomic Abundance Profiles
A tool for creating Microbiome Maps
Abundance profiles from metagenomic sequencing data synthesize information from billions of sequenced reads coming from thousands of microbial genomes. Analyzing and understanding these profiles can be a challenge since the data they represent is complex.
Particularly challenging is their visualization, as existing techniques are inadequate when the taxa number in the thousands. Jasper is a tool for visualizing profiles from metagenomic data, and orders taxa along a Hilbert curve. Each position in the image represents the abundance of a single taxon from a reference collection.
Microbiome Maps
Properties of microbiomes embedded in community abundance profiles such as taxonomic hierarchies and other relationships are not easily described and visualized in traditional generic plotting mechanisms such as stacked bar-charts or line-plots.
What is a Microbiome Map?
Microbiome Maps are visualizations of microbial community profiles. Each pixel in an image represents the relative abundance of a single taxon from a reference collection. Microbiome Maps can be created with Jasper.
What is a Hilbert Curve?
The Hilbert Curve is one of the more prominent examples of space-flling curves, and its construction is based on a recursive partitioning of a square region in the 2D plane and connecting the centers of these squares in a specific order.
Human Microbiome Project body sites.
Animated Maps
Animated microbiome movies are possible because you can fix the position and order of the profiled taxa across multiple samples. This allows you to create maps for different sites and time points, and then see the changes to each microbial neighborhood as you move through your samples.
Visualize
Time Series Data
Multiple Conditions
Biological Interpretations
Microbiome Maps communicate abundance information at different levels of a taxon’s lineage: for metagenomic whole-genome sequencing (mWGS) samples, each position in the image could display information about microbes at the strain level; for 16S samples, each position in the image could display information about microbes at the species level.
Visual Exploration
Jasper can load community abundance profiles for metagenomic whole-genome sequencing (mWGS), and 16S data. If your profiling database contains accession numbers from Ensembl, then you click on a pixel on the main Jasper canvas and find out more information about the taxon that you clicked on.
Fun with Hilbert Curves
The Hilbert Curve is one of the more prominent examples of space-filling curves, and its construction is based on a recursive partitioning of a square region in the 2D plane. When no sample is loaded, Jasper allows you to create Hilbert Curves of many levels so that you can learn how the recursive partitioning works at higher levels of the curve.