About

Jasper is a tool for visualizing profiles from metagenomic whole-genome sequencing (mWGS) and 16S data, and orders taxa along a space-filling Hilbert curve. The result is a “Microbiome Map”, where each position in the image represents the abundance of a single taxon from a reference collection. Jasper can order the taxa in one of two ways, and depending on the ordering, the microbiome maps can highlight “hot spots” of microbes that are either dominant in taxonomic clades or to the biological conditions under study.

This approach can create detailed microbiome maps involving hundreds of thousands of microbial reference genomes with the potential to unravel latent relationships (taxonomic, spatio-temporal, functional, and other) that could remain hidden using traditional visualization techniques.

The input to Jasper can represent a single metagenomic sample, or multiple ones if given in a labeled matrix, and its output will be metagenomic Hilbert images for each sample provided as input. Documentation on the type of profiles, along with formatting guidelines, are all available in the Manual.