Bioinformatics roadmap for characterizing the gut microbiome to study its interactions and associations with the gut mucosal immune system

Abstract

Cataloging the gut microbiome and understanding its interactions and association with the host immune system remains relevant to identify potential treatments for complex chronic diseases, including cancer. Studying the gut microbiome is more accessible than ever, thanks to the dramatic cost reduction of sequencing and the continuous improvements in bioinformatics and machine learning approaches. A plethora of bioinformatics and statistical methods are currently available to analyze gut microbiome sequencing data and evaluate its interactions with the host immune system across health and disease. This review summarizes different approaches and selected bioinformatics tools for gut microbiome data analysis. Furthermore, we underline methods for integrating and correlating sequencing data with other biological datasets, such as those resulting from metabolomics and immunological assays. Overall, this review provides a roadmap to help researchers with limited programming experience understand the approaches available to study the gut microbial community in relation to their topic of interest.