Abstract
The human microbiome has been proposed as a tool to investigate different forensic questions, including for the identification of multiple personal information. However, the fragmented state of the publicly available data has retarded the development of analysis techniques and, therefore, the implementation of microbiomes as a forensic tool. To address this, we introduce the forensic microbiome database (FMD), which is a collection of 16S rRNA data and associated metadata generated from publicly available data. The raw data was further normalized and processed using a pipeline to create a standardized data set for downstream analysis. We present a website allowing for the exploration of geolocation signals in the FMD. The website allows users to investigate the taxonomic differences between microbiomes harvested from different locations and to predict the geolocation of their data based on the FMD sequences. All the results are presented in dynamic graphics to allow for a rapid and intuitive investigation of the taxonomic distributions underpinning the geolocation signals and prediction between locations. Apart from the forensic aspect, the database also allows exploration and comparison of microbiome samples from different geolocation and between different body sites. The goal of the FMD is to provide the scientific and non-scientific communities with data and tools to explore the possibilities of microbiomes to answer forensic questions and serve as a model for any future such databases.1
Highlights
Advances in the depth of DNA sequencing over the last couple of decades, labeled as generation sequencing (NGS), has greatly expanded the knowledge of the diversity of bacteria living on or within humans
The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories
KN participated in design and implementation of the project
Summary
Advances in the depth of DNA sequencing over the last couple of decades, labeled as generation sequencing (NGS), has greatly expanded the knowledge of the diversity of bacteria living on or within humans (microbiomes). The associated website allows users to compare microbiomes from different geographic locations and body sites, as well as to upload data that can be compared to microbiomes in the database and for which the geolocation of the sample can be predicted (Figure 1). The results from these analyses are provided in dynamic visualizations, which show the taxonomic distribution underpinning the analyses and how the individual samples compare to each other. 2http://fmd.jcvi.org/help.php samples which validates the unique microbiome composition of different body sites. When we remove the samples where a single genus is more than 60% of microbiome composition, only eight vagina samples were predicted as a stool instead of 35 wrong predictions (Supplementary Figure S3)
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