# Microbiome Meta-Analysis Platform

> **NIH NIH R44** · INFOTECH SOFT, INC. · 2020 · $293,790

## Abstract

Researchers from very diverse fields are expanding their research to microbiome studies to
understand the interactions between microbes, hosts, and the environment. As new
technologies for accelerated production of microbiome sequence data have enabled this type
of research, there is a pressing need for high performance computation resources that
accommodate flexible and consistent configuration, deployment, and execution of constantly
improving analytical pipelines and that enable data harmonization and interoperability.
Standards for data and experimental representation are still being developed and enhanced,
resulting in semantic inconsistency and incompatible data formats and conventions, and
therefore presenting data integration and management challenges. Meta-analyses of pooled
data are becoming more widespread as computational power increases. Assessment of the
sources of variation in microbiota profiling is sorely needed to understand how to combine and
integrate data from different studies. As the field rapidly evolves and new sequencing and
processing techniques are developed, the use of hard-coded scientific pipelines limits the scope
of biological interpretations. We propose to develop a “Microbiome Meta-Analysis Platform”
(MIMAP) that takes advantage of cluster computing, software containerization, and semantic
data integration technologies to enable building, modifying and evaluating alternative
bioinformatics pipelines for reproducibility studies, new studies, and meta-analysis of
microbiome data from different cohorts, from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, from
public sources, collaborators and in-house studies. It enables deployment and testing of
existing and emerging bacterial identification and downstream analysis algorithms, substitution
of tools to test new approaches, and semantic modeling of data for pooling of multiple studies
and for integration of clinical information through a friendly user interface designed with
guidance of an expert team of microbiome specialists. It also allows researchers to perform
quality control evaluations using positive and negative controls and provenance data. In Phase
I, the main workflow execution, data modeling, and evaluation strategies will be prototyped to
demonstrate feasibility. During Phase II development, the complete MIMAP system will be
created as a solution for the execution of microbiome research.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10011865
- **Project number:** 5R44GM123827-04
- **Recipient organization:** INFOTECH SOFT, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Mansur R. Kabuka
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $293,790
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-08-01 → 2021-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10011865

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10011865, Microbiome Meta-Analysis Platform (5R44GM123827-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10011865. Licensed CC0.

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