Tax4Fun is an open source R package that predicts the functional capabilities of microbial communities based on 16S rRNA data. It can be applied to the output of 16S rRNA analysis pipelines that can perform a mapping of 16S rRNA gene reads to SILVA database.
Prediction of functional profiles using Tax4Fun, includes three steps:
- SILVA-based 16S rRNA profile is transformed to a taxonomic profile of the prokaryotic KEGG organisms. This linear transformation is realized by a precomputed association matrix.
- The estimated abundances of KEGG organisms are normalized by the 16S rRNA copy number obtained from the NCBI genome annotations.
- The normalized taxonomic abundances are used to linearly combine the precomputed functional profiles of the KEGG organisms for the prediction of the functional profile of the microbial community.
For complete details about the methodology, please visit the Tax4Fun page.