PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Alex D Washburne
AU  - Justin D Silverman
AU  - Jonathan W Leff
AU  - Dominic J Bennett
AU  - John L. Darcy
AU  - Sayan Mukherjee
AU  - Noah Fierer
AU  - Lawrence A David
TI  - Phylogenetic factorization of compositional data
AID  - 10.1101/074112
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 074112
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/12/074112.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/09/12/074112.full
AB  - Marker gene sequencing of microbial communities has generated big datasets of microbial relative abundances varying across environmental conditions, sample sites and treatments. These data often come with putative phylogenies, providing unique opportunities to investigate how shared evolutionary history affects microbial abundance patterns. Here, we present a method to identify the phylogenetic factors driving patterns in microbial community composition. We use the method, “phylofactorization”, to re-analyze datasets from human body and soil microbial communities, demonstrating how phylofactorization can be a dimensionality-reducing tool, an ordination-visualization tool, and also mass-produce inferences on the edges in the phylogeny in which meaningful differences arose.