Elhanan Borenstein, Ph.D.

FishTaco
FishTaco is a computational framework for linking taxonomic and functional shifts in the microbiome. This framework is available through FishTaco home website (FishTaco>Home) and the source code can be downloaded via GitHub (FishTaco>Code).



» FishTaco>Home
  Learn how to install and use FishTaco in your analysis.

» FishTaco>Code (GitHub; pip-installable)
  Download the FishTaco source code from GitHub repository.

» FishTaco>Online Visualization
  Interactive visualization of FishTaco-based functional shift decomposition.



Understanding FishTaco Analysis

FishTaco is a novel statistical and computational framework that aims to decompose functional shifts observed in a comparative analysis into individual taxon-level contributions. It relies on a permutation-based approach and carefully designed normalization and scaling schemes to preserve overall community taxonomic characteristics and to account not only for variation induced by each taxon but also for the way this variation correlates with community-wide context. Moreover, it can incorporate any desired shift-metric and is thereby applicable to a wide array of metagenomic comparative analyses. FishTaco further employs a sophisticated game-theory mathematical technique to account for inter-species non-linear dependencies and to optimally estimate the contribution of each taxon.
If you are using FishTaco please cite the following paper:
Ohad Manor and Elhanan Borenstein, Systematic characterization and analysis of the taxonomic drivers of functional shifts in the human microbiome. Cell Host and Microbe, 21, 254-267, 2017.