Shiny + MetaProteomics + gut microbiome = pepFunk!

Did I spend more time looking at "Funky" gifs than using this great online ShinyApp?

(Funky BigFoot seems to...imply...yes...?...)

Inspirational paper? This great new tool!

Wow -- the the Gifs are making me a little dizzy, to be honest.

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(.....toooo pepFunkyTown....)

Despite my clear focus in this blog post, the "pep" in "pepFunk" is the central story in the paper. These authors find that when doing gut microbiome metaproteomics (i.e. digesting poo and trying to figure out what is there) that the peptide centric approach is a much better indicator than assembling to the protein level and then trying to interpret.

That makes a ton of sense because the whole technique of rolling up incomplete data at the protein coverage level to incomplete data at the FASTA level (since we don't have a true database of every organism that is present or their distribution) makes even less sense in a population this diverse than usual.

This isn't a suprise, but how do you utilize peptide centric data? Not easy -- until you've got a simple web app to dump data into!

You can check out the online version of the pepFunk Shiny App here.