Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

TaxSEA 1.5.7

Documentation

• Corrected the described output of TaxSEA() in the README and the main vignette: it returns All_databases plus one data frame per group of sources, each with 6 columns, not three data frames with 5.
• The README said BugSigDB was one of six databases used by default; it has been optional since 1.5.4. It now also lists the literature-collated sets (Valles-Colomer gut-brain modules, BloSSUM, VANISH and others).
• Added ssTaxSEA() to the README, which did not mention single-sample scoring at all, and corrected taxon_set_ranks() to taxon_rank_sets() and data(TaxSEA_DB) to data(TaxSEA_db).
• The README now points at the guides on the package website, and the website leads with them.

TaxSEA 1.5.6

• Rewrote the package description: it now leads with what TaxSEA is for and describes both approaches, TaxSEA() on ranked taxa and ssTaxSEA() on a single sample. Also fixed two long-standing typos in it (“alternations”, and a missing “can be applied”).

TaxSEA 1.5.5

Breaking changes

• The BacDive sets in TaxSEA_db have been rebuilt from a fresh, complete harvest of BacDive: 1,776 sets covering 9,045 taxa, up from 267 sets covering 716. Results for BacDive_bacterial_physiology will differ from earlier releases, and code that refers to BacDive sets by name needs updating.

  • Set names changed. Names no longer contain spaces and follow BacDive_<Family>_<value>. For example:

    Before	Now
    BacDive_facultative anaerobe	BacDive_Oxygen_facultative_anaerobe
    BacDive_anaerobe, BacDive_aerobe, BacDive_microaerophile	BacDive_Oxygen_anaerobe, BacDive_Oxygen_aerobe, BacDive_Oxygen_microaerophile
    BacDive_rod-shaped, BacDive_coccus-shaped	BacDive_Shape_rod, BacDive_Shape_coccus (and BacDive_Shape_coccoid, coccus or ovoid)
    BacDive_Utilizes_<substrate>	BacDive_Uses_<substrate>, split by assay (below)
    BacDive_Enzyme_alkaline phosphatase	BacDive_Enzyme_alkaline_phosphatase

  • Memberships changed. Sets now contain measured BacDive data only, aggregated over every strain of each species. Membership that came from the earlier LLM-derived table is gone. For example, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii is no longer in the anaerobe set, because BacDive holds no oxygen tolerance record for it.

  • Substrate use is split by assay. Growing on a substrate, fermenting it, producing acid or gas from it, reducing it, respiring it and using it as a nitrogen source are different physiology and are now separate sets. The former BacDive_Utilizes_nitrate mixed several of these; the nearest equivalent is BacDive_Uses_nitrate_reduction.

  • Because TaxSEA compares each set against all other taxa covered by the sets being analysed, the larger BacDive collection and the extended NCBI_ids also shift p-values slightly for other sources. On the bundled test data, the top-ranked metabolite-producer and health-association sets are unchanged, with small movements in p-value and order.

New features

• New BacDive families: Gram stain, motility, spore formation, cell shape, growth temperature class, salt tolerance, pH range, GC content, enzyme activities, metabolite production, respiratory quinones, peptidoglycan type and more. Sets of species tested and found negative are included (suffix _negative), which earlier releases could not express.
• NCBI_ids extended with the species names of every BacDive set member, with spaces and with underscores, including former names of reclassified species (e.g. Bacteroides vulgatus and Phocaeicola vulgatus both map to 821), and each member’s taxid as its own name. No existing entry was changed. Names that were present with no taxid, and so never mapped, were filled where BacDive resolves them. This also recovers members of other sources: taxa in TaxSEA_db with no NCBI_ids entry fell from 84 to 57.
• Provenance for the BacDive sets ships in inst/extdata: BacDive_set_provenance.tsv (per set: source family, analyte, number of species and strains) and BacDive_build_info.tsv (harvester release, BacDive client version, harvest dates). How the sets were built is documented in inst/scripts/make_BacDive_sets.R; the pipeline is https://github.com/feargalr/bacdive_harvester.

TaxSEA 1.5.4

Breaking changes

• TaxSEA() no longer includes BugSigDB by default; use bugsigdb = TRUE to include it. Previously it was included automatically whenever bugsigdbr was installed.

  Why this matters: TaxSEA tests each taxon set by comparing its members against all the other taxa covered by the sets being analysed. BugSigDB adds thousands of signatures covering many extra taxa, so switching it on changes that comparison for every set, not just the BugSigDB ones. The same metabolite-producer set can get a different p-value depending on whether BugSigDB was included, and on which BugSigDB release was downloaded; on the bundled test data some p-values moved by as much as 0.26. Leaving it off by default keeps results reproducible and lets TaxSEA() run offline.

Bug fixes

• If BugSigDB cannot be downloaded (for example during a Zenodo outage), TaxSEA(bugsigdb = TRUE) now warns and continues without it instead of failing. The vignette and tests likewise skip their BugSigDB-dependent parts, so an upstream outage no longer breaks the package build.
• The main vignette and README accessed BugSigDB results as taxsea_results$BugSigdB, which silently returns NULL; corrected to $BugSigDB. The vignette also documented a nonexistent database argument.
• get_taxon_sets() had a default argument referring to a nonexistent object, so calling it with no argument failed with object 'taxon' not found. It now reports the missing argument properly. It also no longer runs unreachable code after return(), and correctly handles a lookup that resolves to more than one NCBI ID.

Other

• Raised the R dependency to 4.6.0 to match Bioconductor 3.24.
• get_ncbi_taxon_ids() uses vapply() instead of sapply(), and qualifies its utils calls.
• taxon_rank_sets() examples use \donttest rather than \dontrun.

TaxSEA 1.5.3

New

• TaxSEA() gains a bugsigdb argument controlling whether BugSigDB signatures are downloaded and included at run time.

Testing

• Added unit tests for ssTaxSEA(), for ORA mode and for TaxSEA() input validation, none of which were previously covered.
• Added regression snapshots of the results produced from the bundled test data, so that database updates surface as a reviewable diff.
• Added database integrity checks covering set naming, set sizes and NCBI_ids coverage. These document two pre-existing issues: 84 set members have no NCBI_ids entry and are silently dropped (worst affected are Siderophore_producers, 73 members of which 25 are usable, and the Valles-Colomer2019 Gut-Brain Modules), and GutMGene_producers_of_Phenylalanine appears twice, so two of its taxa are unreachable.

Documentation

• Corrected the documented default for max_set_size in TaxSEA(), which said 100 while the signature has been 300.
• Documented that including BugSigDB changes the p-values of all taxon sets, not only the BugSigDB ones.

TaxSEA 1.5.2

Breaking changes

• ssTaxSEA() now scores each taxon set as the mean centered log-ratio (CLR) of the set’s members within a sample, replacing the previous ranked, cohort z-scored, ssGSEA-style running-sum statistic.
• ssTaxSEA() returns a numeric matrix with taxon sets as rows and samples as columns, instead of a list of two matrices oriented samples x sets. Code written as res$scores[sample, set] becomes res[set, sample].
• ssTaxSEA() no longer returns p-values. The score is a descriptive statistic; test it across samples with a test appropriate to your design.

New

• ssTaxSEA() gains a pseudocount argument (default 0.5), added to every value before the log transform rather than only to zeros.
• ssTaxSEA() now works on a single sample, because the score no longer references the rest of the cohort.
• ssTaxSEA() rejects proportion-like input (columns summing to 1), negative values, non-finite values and empty samples, instead of silently producing meaningless scores.

Bug fixes

• The CLR is now computed across all supplied taxa before subsetting to set members. Previously the matrix was filtered to set members first, which made the geometric mean the CLR divides by depend on which sets were being tested and could manufacture apparent signal in sets that had none.

TaxSEA 1.5.1

• Removed R/TaxSEA_export.R, an outdated duplicate of an internal function that shadowed the current version.
• Declared the methods import and the remaining stats/utils imports, clearing the Bioconductor devel check warning.
• Recompressed the bundled data (NCBI_ids 136 Kb to 42 Kb, TaxSEA_db 48 Kb to 35 Kb), clearing the data compression warning.
• Added a GitHub Actions workflow running R CMD check and BiocCheck against Bioconductor devel.

TaxSEA 1.3.3

• Add ssTaxSEA() function for single sample enrichment testing and documentation

TaxSEA 1.3.2

• Add taxon_rank_sets() helper with documentation and tests
• Add functionality to interact with tse objects

TaxSEA 1.3.1

• Internal refactor to modular analysis pipeline
• Added infrastructure for over-representation analysis (ORA).
• Improved internal input preparation and validation.

Version 1.1.8 (2025-08-12)

• Added output for all taxon sets
• Fixed spelling in GutMGene_producers_of_Phenyalanine

Version 1.1.7 (2025-08-11)

• Added Gut-Brain modules database from Valles-Colomer et al. Nature Microbiology. 2019.

Version 1.1.6 (2025-08-08)

• Bug fixes

Version 1.1.5 (2025-08-06)

• Fixed bug in BacDive Database

Version 1.1.4 (2025-08-05)

• Added BacDive Database
• Added Blossum and VANISH taxon sets in disease associations category

Version 0.99.2 (2025-02-20)

• Added ability to test custom taxon sets using custom_db parameter.
• Removed deprecated plotting.R file.
• TaxSEA now reports the KS test statistic for each taxon set.

Version 0.99.1 (2025-02-11)

• Bringing into line with requirements for BioConductor submission