Enabling microbiome research on personal devices

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that recent hardware and software advancements enable microbiome data analysis at the scale of large projects like EMP on personal devices, significantly reducing computational costs and time.

Contribution

It introduces a method to perform large-scale microbiome data analysis efficiently on personal laptops, making microbiome research more accessible and cost-effective.

Findings

Analysis of EMP-sized data in minutes on a gaming laptop

Reduction of computational costs for large microbiome datasets

Facilitation of broader microbiome research on personal devices

Abstract

Microbiome studies have recently transitioned from experimental designs with a few hundred samples to designs spanning tens of thousands of samples. Modern studies such as the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) afford the statistics crucial for untangling the many factors that influence microbial community composition. Analyzing those data used to require access to a compute cluster, making it both expensive and inconvenient. We show that recent improvements in both hardware and software now allow to compute key bioinformatics tasks on EMP-sized data in minutes using a gaming-class laptop, enabling much faster and broader microbiome science insights.