MaAsLin2 using microbiota as exposure and repeated outcomes

Downstream analysis and statistics MaAsLin
1

Hi everyone, I started studying MaAsLin2 a short time ago and I would like to ask a questions, please. First, is it possible to use longitudinal analysis with MaAsLin2 with the microbiota as exposure (baseline only) and repeated outcomes? For example, I have microbiota data evaluated at 1 month of life, and infant growth at 1, 3, 6 and 12 months. In this case, for alpha diversity of infant gut microbiota I ran the Linear mixed-effects (LME) regression. But now I need to do it with the abundance of infant gut microbiota e a intend to use MaAsLin2 , byt I don’t know if it’s ok. Another concern is in the case of evaluating growth as an outcome with categorical (data, considering that MaAsLin2 relies on general linear models

Thank you in advance.
Amanda Figueiredo.

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Hi @afigueiredo - MaAsLin 2 uses feature abundances as an outcome (not as an exposure) in the regression model - if the underlying objective of your analysis is to find associations between features and covariates (metadata) from a possibly multivariable model, you can run MaAsLin 2 on your dataset. However, if your modeling strategy requires you to use growth as an outcome and feature abundances as exposure, you might need to use an alternative tool like MIRKAT.

All the best,
Himel