Title: An integrated strategy for functional analysis of microbial communities based on gene ontology and 16S rRNA gene

Authors: Su-Ping Deng; De-Shuang Huang

Addresses: College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Caoan Road 4800, Shanghai 201804, China ' College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Caoan Road 4800, Shanghai 201804, China

Abstract: In order to analyse the similarity among microbial communities on functional state after assigning 16S rRNA sequences from all microbial communities to species. It's an important addition to the species-level relationship between two compared communities and can quantify their differences in function. We downloaded all functional annotation data of several microbiotas. It's developed to identify the functional distribution and the significantly enriched functional categories of microbial communities. We analysed the similarity between two microbial communities on functional state. In the experimental results, it shows that the semantic similarity can quantify the difference between two compared species on function level. It can analyse the function of microbial communities by gene ontology based on 16S rRNA gene. Exploration of the function relationship between two sets of species assemblages will be a key result of microbiome studies and may provide new insights into assembly of a wide range of ecosystems.

Keywords: microbial communities; 16s rRNA gene; gene ontology; bioinformatics; semantic similarity; functional analysis; gene sequences; ecosystems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDMB.2015.070841

International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, 2015 Vol.13 No.1, pp.63 - 74

Received: 27 Feb 2014
Accepted: 03 Mar 2014
Published online: 30 Jul 2015 *

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