Bokulich, Nicholas A.

Learning representations of microbe–metabolite interactions

Integrating multiomics datasets is critical for microbiome research; however, inferring interactions across omics datasets has multiple statistical challenges. We solve this problem by using neural networks (https://github.com/biocore/mmvec) to estimate the conditional probability that each molecule is present given the presence of a specific microorganism. We illustrate with known environmental (desert soil biocrust wetting) and clinical (cystic fibrosis lung) examples, our ability to recover microbe-metabolite relationships, and demonstrate how the method can discover relationships between microbially produced metabolites and inflammatory bowel disease.