What is MaAsLin Differential Abundance Analysis?

MaAsLin (Microbiome Multivariable Association with Linear Models) is comprehensive tool for efficiently determining multivariable associations between experimental metadata and microbial meta-omics features. The MaAsLin2 in CosmosID-HUB enables users to easily configure parameters and run analyses through the Advanced Comparative Analysis module.

If you use the MaAsLin2 tool, please cite the reference manuscript:

Mallick H, Rahnavard A, McIver LJ, Ma S, Zhang Y, Nguyen LH, Tickle TL, Weingart G, Ren B, Schwager EH, Chatterjee S, Thompson KN, Wilkinson JE, Subramanian A, Lu Y, Waldron L, Paulson JN, Franzosa EA, Bravo HC, Huttenhower C (2021). Multivariable Association Discovery in Population-scale Meta-omics Studies. PLoS Computational Biology, 17(11):e1009442. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009442

MaAsLin2 Tutorial

Microbiome Association Detection with MaAsLin 2

MaAsLin2 finds associations between taxonomic and functional features from metagenomic data and complex metadata. The tool relies on general linear models to accommodate most modern microbiome study designs, including support for cross-sectional, longitudinal, multiple covariates, and repeated measures. along with a variety of filtering, normalization, and transformation methods. There are multiple analysis methods, such as filtering, normalization, and transformation options to customize analysis for your specific study.

MaAsLin2 workflow two inputs, which are generated in the CosmosID-HUB:

Profiling Data (feature table)

This includes taxonomic or functional results generated by any of our pipelines. These are .tsv tables where rows are samples and columns are microbial or feature. MaAsLin2 can take raw counts or relative abundances as input.

Metadata

Metadata that describes is required for this analysis, and tutorials on metadata input can be found here.

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Running the MaAsLin2 Workflow

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Viewing and Interpreting MaAsLin2 Results