U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Inferring directional relationships in microbial communities using signed Bayesian networks

NCJ Number
304876
Journal
BMC Genomics Volume: 21 Dated: 2020
Author(s)
M. Sazal; et al
Date Published
2020
Annotation

In this study, we investigate what information, if any, can be provided by a Bayesian Network (BN) about a microbial community.

 

Abstract

Microbe-microbe and host-microbe interactions in a microbiome play a vital role in both health and disease. However, the structure of the microbial community and the colonization patterns are highly complex to infer even under controlled wet laboratory conditions. Since unlike the previously proposed Co-occurrence Networks (CoNs), BNs are based on conditional dependencies and can help in revealing complex associations, we propose a way of combining a BN and a CoN to construct a signed Bayesian Network (sBN). We report a surprising association between directed edges in signed BNs and known colonization orders. BNs are powerful tools for community analysis and extracting influences and colonization patterns, even though the analysis only uses an abundance matrix with no temporal information. We conclude that directed edges in sBNs when combined with negative correlations are consistent with and strongly suggestive of colonization order. (Publisher Abstract Provided)