BugSigDB: accelerating microbiome research through systematic comparison to published microbial signatures

Abstract

AbstractThe literature of human and other host-associated microbiome studies is expanding rapidly, but systematic comparisons among published results of host-associated microbiome signatures of differential abundance remain difficult. We present BugSigDB, a community-editable database of manually curated microbial signatures from published differential abundance studies, accompanied by information on study geography, health outcomes, host body site, and experimental, epidemiological, and statistical methods using controlled vocabulary. BugSigDB is seeded for initial release with >2,500 manually curated signatures from >600 published studies on three host species, enabling high-throughput analysis of signature similarity, taxon enrichment, co-occurrence and co-exclusion, and consensus signatures, allowing assessment of microbiome differential abundance within and across experimental conditions, environments, or body sites. Database-wide analysis revealed experimental conditions with the highest level of consistency in signatures reported by independent studies and identified commonalities among disease-associated signatures including frequent introgression of oral pathobionts into the gut.