Development of a Cytoscape App for microbe-microbe association networks

Microbial associations play a fundamental part in deciphering underlying mechanisms of microbial communities. A series of algorithms have been developed to retrieve such associations from taxa abundance data, however the outcome is usually tool-dependent and a large number of the retrieved associations may be spurious. microbetag is a co-occurrence network annotator aiming at increasing/decreasing the confidence level of the associations of such a network. However, being a command line tool, microbetag’s output is hard to interpret; its true potential can be revealed only by visualizing its findings so researchers can combine the retrieved annotations with their expertise to make further conclusions. Cytoscape Apps support additional features, e.g. new layouts, connection with databases etc, on Cytoscape, a well-established open source software platform for visualizing such interaction networks. Goal of this project is to develop a Cytoscape App providing a graphical interface for the microbetag tool.