Software & methods

Open-source tools for microbiome analysis, and the benchmarks and best-practice guidance behind them. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome on GitHub.

TaxSEA

Bioconductor

Taxon set enrichment analysis. Turn a ranked list of differentially abundant taxa into interpretable signatures from BugSigDB, MiMeDB and other curated databases in seconds.

BiocManager::install("TaxSEA")
Downloads 2026
7,005
Published
Brief. Bioinform. 2025

OpusTaxa

Snakemake

One workflow from raw shotgun reads to results: QC, host removal, taxonomic profiling, assembly and functional annotation, locally or on SLURM clusters.

  • fastp
  • FastQC
  • MultiQC
  • Nonpareil
  • MetaPhlAn
  • Kraken2
  • Bracken
  • SingleM
Runs on
Local · SLURM
Preprint
bioRxiv 2026

More tools & best practice

SPINGO

Python · 2015

Rapid species-level classifier for 16S rRNA amplicon sequences, developed with Guy Allard and Marcus Claesson at University College Cork.

Demovir

R

Order- and family-level taxonomic classification of viral contigs from metagenomes.

BiomeHue

R

Sensible, consistent colours for taxonomic barplots.

Metagenomics tools atlas

Resource

A curated inventory of tools and resources for short-read shotgun metagenomics.

Choice of assembly software has a critical impact on virome characterisation

Microbiome 2019

A benchmark showing that the assembler you pick changes which viruses you find, and by how much.

Reproducible protocols for metagenomic analysis of human faecal phageomes

Microbiome 2018

Laboratory and computational protocols for consistent, comparable studies of the bacteriophages in human stool.