PanPhlAn

Software repository
User forum
Tutorial

PanPhlAn - strain detection and characterization

Pangenome-based Phylogenomic Analysis (PanPhlAn) is a strain-level metagenomic profiling tool for identifying the gene composition and in-vivo transcriptional activity of individual strains in metagenomic samples. PanPhlAn’s ability for strain-tracking and functional analysis of unknown pathogens makes it an efficient tool for culture-free infectious outbreak epidemiology and microbial population studies.

Software repository and supporting material

Software repository of PanPhlAn:
https://github.com/segatalab/panphlan

Available species pangenome databases:
https://github.com/segatalab/panphlan/wiki/Pangenome%20databases

The PanPhlAn tutorial:
https://github.com/segatalab/panphlan/wiki

User support (email-based group and discussion forum):
https://forum.biobakery.org/c/Microbial-community-profiling/PanPhlAn

For comments and question please write to our
user support group or contact directly the Segata lab.

Publication

If you find this tool useful in your research, please cite our papers:

Francesco Beghini1 Lauren J McIver2 Aitor Blanco-Mìguez1 Leonard Dubois1 Francesco Asnicar1 Sagun Maharjan2,3 Ana Mailyan2,3 Andrew Maltez Thomas1 Paolo Manghi1 Matthias Scholz2,3 Mireia Valles-Colomer1 George Weingart2,3 Yancong Zhang2,3 Moreno Zolfo1 Curtis Huttenhower2,3 Eric A Franzosa2,3 Nicola Segata1,5

Integrating taxonomic, functional, and strain-level profiling of diverse microbial communities with bioBakery 3

eLife(2021) https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65088

1 Department CIBIO, University of Trento, Italy

2 Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

3 The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA

4 Department of Food Quality and Nutrition, Research and Innovation Center, Edmund Mach Foundation, Italy

5 IEO, European Institute of Oncology IRCCS, Milan, Italy

Matthias Scholz1,* Doyle V. Ward2,* Edoardo Pasolli1,* Thomas Tolio1 Moreno Zolfo1 Francesco Asnicar1 Duy Tin Truong1 Adrian Tett1 Ardythe L. Morrow3 Nicola Segata1

Strain-level microbial epidemiology and population genomics from shotgun metagenomics

Nature Methods 13, 435–438, 2016. 10.1038/nmeth.3802

* Equal contribution

1 Centre for Integrative Biology, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

2 Center for Microbiome Research, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

3 Department of Pediatrics, Perinatal Institute, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

Example of E. coli strain profiling

Characterization of the German 2011 E. coli outbreak strain

PanPhlAn profiling of the German outbreak metagenomes using a reference database in which the target outbreak genome is missing. (a) Hierarchical clustering. The heatmap displays presence/absence gene-family profiles of 110 reference strains (bright colored columns) and of 12 metagenomically detected strains (darker columns). Most outbreak samples cluster together due to almost identical profiles (right), with four samples (left) showing different profiles due to the presence of additional dominant E. coli strains overlying the target outbreak strain. (b) Functional analysis of outbreak-specific gene-families (Fisher exact test) confirmed that the outbreak strain is a combination of a EAEC pathogen (pAA plasmid) with acquired Shiga toxin and antibiotic resistance genes, complemented with a set of enriched virulence-related functions and pathway modules.