Participants involved in microbiome studies are often interested in receiving feedback on their own data. It is important to try and accomodate this interest in order to foster participant engagement.
MicRowave attempts to address participant egagement by creating a visually appealing representation of participants' microbiome profiles whilst retaining a level of abstraction that reduces a requirement for detailed explanation of the profile i.e which bacteria are present and what is the relevance of the abundances of these organisms. To achieve this, micRowave takes a table of taxonomic abundances as output in metagenomic or 16S rRNA analyses, contructs a data frame of points that represent different taxa, colours the points by taxon and randomly distributes them across a wave (see below and thanks to gganimate).
Once the wave is produced, an epithelial barrier (optional) is superimposed on the image to form a gut-like image. This provides a visual representation of an individual's microbiome that only retains information regarding the taxonomic abundance of organisms - without a direct identification of those organisms.
micRowave is installable from github using the devtools package. An example dataset is loaded on loading of micRowave and can be run using the following commands.
install.packages("devtools")
install_github("nickilott/micRowave")
library("micRowave")
microwave(genus_abundances, text="Thanks for participating")
This will produce two png files - sample1 is a profile from colon and sample2 is a profile from small intestine shown below.
sample1 - colon
sample2 - small intestine
