Megascale microbiome analysis with DartUniFrac.

Zhao, Jianshu; McDonald, Daniel; Sfiligoi, Igor; Lladser, Manuel E; Patel, Lucas; Weng, Yuhan; Khatib, Lora; Degregori, Samuel et al. · Nat Biotechnol · 2026

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Abstract

UniFrac measures phylogeny-aware differences between microbiome samples but scales poorly with modern dataset sizes. We introduce an algorithm, DartUniFrac, and a near-optimal implementation with graphics processing unit acceleration that is up to three orders of magnitude faster than UniFrac and scales to millions of samples (pairwise) and billions of taxa. DartUniFrac connects UniFrac with weighted Jaccard similarity and exploits sketching algorithms for fast computation.