Northern lights over Santa Fe!

Rank-choice voting AND a roadrunner sticker? NM has voting figured out.

7/ (Ex. 2) In longitudinal microbiome samples from healthy humans taking an antibiotic (collab with @ksxue.bsky.social), FAVA is much higher post-abx than pre-abx, and just half of the 22 subjects return to their baseline FAVA level (computed in 6-sample sliding window) during the 30 days post-abx!

6/ (Ex. 1) In microbiome samples collected along the GI tracts of individuals from 7 ruminant species, FAVA peaks in the small intestine–so lots of variability would have been missed by stool sampling! We also find taxonomic variability >> functional variability–evidence for functional redundancy.

5/ FAVA can account for phylogenetic similarity among taxa and can differentially weight samples, which is especially useful for time series data (Fig. 3). FAVA can be computed in sliding windows to see how variability changes over space or time (Fig. 4). We demonstrate FAVA in 2 examples.

3/ FAVA extends the pop-gen statistic FST (which traditionally measures variability of allele frequencies across multiple populations) to instead measure variability of taxonomic or functional abundances across multiple microbiome samples (Fig. 1). All it needs is an OTU table, or similar.

1/ Hey y'all, I'm excited to share my latest paper, which is out now in PNAS! We introduce FAVA, a statistical framework to measure compositional variability across microbiome samples. If you want to measure variability across a stacked bar plot, FAVA is for you! Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

It's been easy to feel powerless these past few months, but the @standupforscience.bsky.social rally in SF this afternoon was an important reminder that the fight is not over!

I'm stoked to be at #SMBE2024! If you're interested in variability/diversity, microbiomes, and/or non-traditional applications of FST, I would love to chat!

Poster Weds #44, title: Quantifying the stability of microbiomes and the timescale of antibiotic perturbation with FAVA

Just bought some science stamps! Now we only need a theory edition... store.usps.com/store/produc...