# MetaQuery: a web server for rapid annotation and quantitative analysis of specific genes in the human gut microbiome

## TL;DR

MetaQuery is a web tool that helps researchers quickly analyze the abundance of specific genes in the human gut microbiome across thousands of samples.

## Contribution

MetaQuery provides a user-friendly platform for rapid quantitative analysis and statistical associations of genes in gut metagenomes.

## Key findings

- MetaQuery analyzes gene abundance across 1267 fecal metagenomes from individuals in America, Europe, and China.
- The tool identifies associations between genes, taxa, diseases, and genome size variations.
- It enables rapid and accessible metagenomic analysis for non-expert users.

## Abstract

Summary: Microbiome researchers frequently want to know how abundant a particular microbial gene or pathway is across different human hosts, including its association with disease and its co-occurrence with other genes or microbial taxa. With thousands of publicly available metagenomes, these questions should be easy to answer. However, computational barriers prevent most researchers from conducting such analyses. We address this problem with MetaQuery, a web application for rapid and quantitative analysis of specific genes in the human gut microbiome. The user inputs one or more query genes, and our software returns the estimated abundance of these genes across 1267 publicly available fecal metagenomes from American, European and Chinese individuals. In addition, our application performs downstream statistical analyses to identify features that are associated with gene variation, including other query genes (i.e. gene co-variation), taxa, clinical variables (e.g. inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes) and average genome size. The speed and accessibility of MetaQuery are a step toward democratizing metagenomics research, which should allow many researchers to query the abundance and variation of specific genes in the human gut microbiome.

Availability and implementation:
http://metaquery.docpollard.org.

Contact:
snayfach@gmail.com

Supplementary information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.