Microbial Metagenomics Analysis Center

Advances in next-generation sequencing have revolutionized our understanding of the human microbiome. Translational investigations of microbial communities now permeate nearly every field of medicine; with host-associated bacteria, virus, and fungi, or their downstream metabolites, implicated in numerous disease states. However, incorporating microbiome research into existing translational research programs presents unique challenges—not only with collecting and sequencing microbial community samples, but also with properly analyzing the large amounts of sparse, compositional, high-dimensional data generated by next-generation sequencing.

The Microbial Metagenomics Analysis Center (MMAC) is a joint initiative of investigators in the Divisions of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Biomedical Informatics, and Infectious Diseases to provide state-of-art-solutions to investigators in the areas of study design, bioinformatic processing of amplicon and shotgun metagenomic sequencing data, integration of metagenomic and clinical data structures, and the statistical analyses of microbial community samples.

The MMAC works closely with the Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics Laboratory to streamline workflows for metagenomic sequencing, bioinformatic processing, and statistical analysis of microbiome projects.