What problem does it solve?
It helps you analyze biological sequences and microbiome/community data end-to-end—covering file I/O, alignments, phylogenetics, diversity metrics, ordination, and key non-parametric tests—without stitching together multiple fragile tools.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Sequence manipulation & I/O: Read/write common sequence and metadata-rich biological formats (e.g., FASTA/FASTQ/GenBank/Newick, etc.) and perform validated transformations like reverse complement, transcription, and translation.
- Alignments & phylogenetic analysis: Compute pairwise and multiple alignments, build phylogenetic trees from distance matrices, and evaluate tree distances/topology comparisons.
- Microbial ecology statistics: Calculate alpha/beta diversity (including UniFrac variants), perform ordination (PCoA/CCA/RDA), and run tests like PERMANOVA/ANOSIM/PERMDISP/Mantel.
- Practical workflows: Integrate with BIOM feature tables and convert outputs into distance matrices and ordination/statistical objects for downstream reporting.
- Use case: You have a set of microbial community samples stored as a BIOM table plus a phylogenetic tree, and you need UniFrac distances, PCoA coordinates, and PERMANOVA to test group differences.
Quick Start
Use the scikit-bio skill to compute PCoA coordinates from your beta-diversity distance matrix and report the main axes for your sample groups.