Tracking Microbiome Changes Linked to Disease Onset—Can MaAsLin Do This?

Downstream analysis and statistics MaAsLin
1

Hello!

I’m just starting my project and I’m not an expert, so sorry if this is the wrong place to ask or if I’m misunderstanding something.

I’m planning to look at the skin microbiome of a cohort at baseline and then every six months for two years. If someone develops the disease of interest during that time, I want to calculate how the relative abundances of all the taxa change from baseline to the point when they get the disease. I’d like to see which taxa changes are associated with disease development.

Can this kind of analysis be done in MaAsLin?

Thanks so much in advance!

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Yep - you can definitely do this. Depending on what sort of question you want to answer, you could start with a formula with an indicator of disease vs. baseline and random effects per-subject, and you could then expand it to include other covariates. This would then test for prevalence and abundance associations with the disease while controlling for repeated measurements and whatever else you want to account for.

Will