expam-high-resolution analysis of metagenomes using distance trees.

Abstract

Shotgun metagenomic sequencing provides the capacity to understand microbial community structure and function at unprecedented resolution; however, the current analytical methods are constrained by a focus on taxonomic classifications that may obfuscate functional relationships. Here, we present expam, a tree-based, taxonomy agnostic tool for the identification of biologically relevant clades from shotgun metagenomic sequencing. expam is an open-source Python application released under the GNU General Public Licence v3.0. expam installation instructions, source code and tutorials can be found at https://github.com/seansolari/expam. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.