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Abstract Summary: Studies of the human microbiome, and microbial community ecology in general, have blossomed of late and are now a burgeoning source of exciting research findings. Along with the advent of next-generation sequencing platforms, which have dramatically increased the scope of microbiome-related projects, several high-performance sequence analysis pipelines (e.g. QIIME, MOTHUR, VAMPS) are now available to investigators for microbiome analysis. The subject of our manuscript, the graphical user interface-based Explicet software package, fills a previously unmet need for a robust, yet intuitive means of integrating the outputs of the software pipelines with user-specified metadata and then visualizing the combined data. Availability and Implementation: Explicet is implemented in C++ via the Qt framework and supported in native code on all major operating systems (Windows, Macintosh, Linux). The source code, documents and tutorials are freely available under an open-source license at www.explicet.org. Contact: daniel.frank@ucdenver.edu
Robertson et al. (Tue,) studied this question.