CoMet—a web server for comparative functional profiling of metagenomes

Abstract

Analyzing the functional potential of newly sequenced genomes and metagenomes has become a common task in biomedical and biological research. With the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies comparative metagenomics opens the way to elucidate the genetically determined similarities and differences of complex microbial communities. We developed the web server 'CoMet' (http://comet.gobics.de), which provides an easy-to-use comparative metagenomics platform that is well-suitable for the analysis of large collections of metagenomic short read data. CoMet combines the ORF finding and subsequent assignment of protein sequences to Pfam domain families with a comparative statistical analysis. Besides comprehensive tabular data files, the CoMet server also provides visually interpretable output in terms of hierarchical clustering and multi-dimensional scaling plots and thus allows a quick overview of a given set of metagenomic samples.