Facilitating multi-omic analyses in microbiome research with MultiAssayExperiment

Author(s): Tuomas Borman,Artur Sannikov,Kati Hanhineva,Leo M Lahti

Affiliation(s): University of Turku, Finland



The demand for data analytical strategies for multi-omic integration is steadily increasing in various application domains. The Bioconductor MultiAssayExperiment data container provides optimized and extensively tested tools to deal with heterogeneous multi-domain data. The availability of methods extending this container has been steadily increasing. Working with different combinations of omics data often requires additional customization, however, and developing standardized general-purpose methods remains challenging. We discuss recently enhanced open data availability and associated methods development in the context of microbiome research, with a particular focus on integrating parallel measurements from metagenome, metabolome, and transcriptome profiling studies. The presentation will conclude by summarizing some of the prevailing gaps in statistical data integration techniques within the Bioconductor multi-assay framework.