Enabling 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.