Tag : Scale

Beijing: A new study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Beijing Institute of Life Sciences has suggested a new method (NetMoss) for efficiently integrating large-scale microbiome data with biomarker discovery. The findings of the research were published in the journal ‘Nature Computational Science’. The relationship between the gut microbiome and human health has received increasing attention in recent years, and a huge amount of data, which is complex in type and large in quantity, has been accumulated with unprecedented growth. However, it is challenging to extract information closely related to disease from such big data. On the one hand, the gut microbiome is more likely to be influenced by various factors such as diet and geography. The composition of the gut microbiome may vary greatly among different populations, which leads to bias in the direct integration of data and the identification of biomarkers based on abundance. On the other hand, the microbial abundance matrix is too sparse, and it is difficult for conventional computational methods to remove batch effects based on this sparse matrix. The newly proposed algorithm uses microbial interaction networks to effectively integrate data from different populations. It can quantify the topological differences between different network modules by comparing the perturbations of microbial networks in different states, thus enabling the identification of disease-associated biomarkers. Compared with previous methods, NetMoss can unbiasedly integrate different batches of microbial data more efficiently, mine disease-associated biomarkers, and identify microbial dysbiosis covariation patterns that drive the occurrence of multiple diseases. In this study, the researchers coll ...