incorporating metadata

Hi guys,

I have been using mothur for a while now but its my first post here (I usually get around problems by asking others that use them extensively or trial-and-error approach :smiley: ). It’s a great program, thanks for developing!

Anyway, I was just wondering if there are any ways to incorporate metadata in there. I am specifically interested if any of the metadata I have between samples can be used to explain the differences between the samples.

More specifically, I am working on gut samples from different patients which I also have information on their nationality, age, height, etc. I would like to know if there are statically significant trend between any of these metadata and their gut community.

Schloss’ 454 SOP seems to use corr.axes for this, but command page for corr.axes does not have any explanation on metadata so I am not entirely sure how I can use this about, especially as I have multiple metadata I would like to do this with.

Thanks in advance!

There’s a lot you can do within and outside of mothur to incorporate metadata. For categorical data you can do amova, homovoa, unifracs, anosim, classify.shared, etc. For continuous data you can use corr.axes. Then you can also do more complicated univariate and multivariate analyses by using the outputted mothur files in R, SAS, SPSS, to do whatever you want.

thanks, I will have a look!