I am very pleased to announce the release of my tool BNGAL, a network analysis-driven solution to microbial niche identification. BNGAL comprises both an R package and standalone command line tool for microbial community network construction from taxonomic count tables. BNGAL comes from spending much of my PhD stumbling through the analysis of community-level statistics with 16S rRNA gene datasets, which are still very commonly used in the field of microbial ecology. I often found myself in situations where I would go through the trouble of identifying microbes from 16S data, and then I wouldn’t even know where to start for the real fun: getting a systems-level understanding of the potential community structure. I am excited enough about its release that I used it as an excuse to revive my long-slumbering website. :)
For more information about BNGAL, please visit its Wiki.
If you ever find BNGAL helpful for your research, please consider citing our recent paper that used this tool!