Journal Article

Melody: meta-analysis of microbiome association studies for discovering generalizable microbial signatures

Chen, Guanhua, Wei, Zhoujingpeng, Tang, Zheng-Zheng

2025

Overview

Standard protocols for meta-analysis of association studies are inadequate for microbiome data due to their complex compositional structure, leading to inaccurate and unstable microbial signature selection. To address this issue, we introduce Melody, a framework that generates, harmonizes, and combines study-specific summary association statistics to powerfully and robustly identify microbial signatures in meta-analysis. Comprehensive and realistic simulations demonstrate that Melody substantially outperforms existing approaches in prioritizing true signatures. In the meta-analyses of five studies on colorectal cancer and eight studies on the gut metabolome, we showcase the superior stability, reliability, and predictive performance of Melody-identified signatures.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Absolute abundance / Animal Genetics and Genomics / Best subset selection / Bioinformatics / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Colorectal carcinoma / colorectal neoplasms / Colorectal Neoplasms - microbiology / Compositional data / digestive system / Estimates / Evolutionary Biology / Gastrointestinal Microbiome / genome / Genomics / Human Genetics / Humans / Life Sciences / Meta-analysis / Metabolome / Methodology / Microbial Genetics and Genomics / microbiome / Microbiomes / Microbiota / Plant Genetics and Genomics / Quasi-multinomial model / Relative abundance / Sample size / Software / Sparsity / Statistical analysis / statistics