coreTaxa: Taxa Included in the Core Microbiome

In holobiont: Microbiome Analysis Tools

Taxa Included in the Core Microbiome

Description

Finds the microbial taxa that are part of the core microbiome.

Usage

coreTaxa(x, core_fraction = 0.5, ab_threshold1 = 0, ab_threshold2 = 0,
ab_threshold3 = 0, selection='basic', max_tax = NULL,
increase_cutoff = 2,  remove_zeros=TRUE)

Arguments

x	(Required) Microbial community data. This must be in the form of a phyloseq object and must contain, at a minimum, an OTU abundance table.
core_fraction	The fraction of samples that a microbial taxon must be found in to be considered part of the 'core' microbiome. This variable is only used when selection = 'basic' and is ignored when selection = 'shade'. The default value is 0.5.
ab_threshold1	The threshold for mean relative abundance across all samples. This variable is only used when selection = 'basic' and is ignored when selection = 'shade'. The default value is 0.
ab_threshold2	The threshold for maximum relative abundance in any sample. This variable is only used when selection = 'basic' and is ignored when selection = 'shade'. The default value is 0.
ab_threshold3	The threshold for minimum relative abundance across all samples. This variable is only used when selection = 'basic' and is ignored when selection = 'shade'. The default value is 0.
selection	Whether to use thresholds ('basic') or the Shade and Stopnisek method ('shade') to define the core community. The default is 'basic'.
max_tax	The maximum number of taxa to add sequentially, as a percentage of the total taxa when using the Shade and Stopnisek method. This variable is only used when selection = 'shade' and is ignored when selection = 'basic'.
increase_cutoff	The threshold for the percent increase in beta diversity used to identify the taxon at which point adding more taxa yields diminishing returns in explanatory power. This variable is only used when selection = 'shade' and is ignored when selection = 'basic'.
remove_zeros	Whether or not to remove taxa that are no reads associated across any of the samples.

Details

coreTaxa identifies the microbial taxa of the core microbiome based on either the tip-based or the branch-based core community phylogeny using either basic thresholds or a modification of the Shade and Stopnisek (2019) algorithm. For more details, see Bewick and Camper (2025).

Value

This function returns a list of the microbial taxa associated with the core microbiome.

References

Shade, Ashley, and Nejc Stopnisek. "Abundance-occupancy distributions to prioritize plant core microbiome membership." Current opinion in microbiology 49 (2019): 50-58.

Examples

#Test with enterotype dataset
library(phyloseq)
library(ape)
library(phytools)
data(enterotype)

set.seed(1)

#Generate an example tree and label it with the names of the microbial taxa
enterotype_tree<-rtree(length(taxa_names(enterotype)))
enterotype_tree$tip.label<-taxa_names(enterotype)
enterotype_tree$node.label<-as.character(1:1:enterotype_tree$Nnode)

#Create a phyloseq object with a tree
example_phyloseq<-phyloseq(otu_table(enterotype),phy_tree(as.phylo(enterotype_tree)))

coreTaxa(example_phyloseq)

holobiont documentation built on Aug. 8, 2025, 7:31 p.m.