iMicrobe: Tools and data-dreaiven discovery platform for the microbiome sciences.

Background: Scientists have amassed a wealth of microbiome datasets, making it possible to study microbes in biotic and abiotic systems on a population or planetary scale; however, this potential has not been fully realized given that the tools, datasets, and computation are available in diverse repositories and locations. To address this challenge, we developed iMicrobe.us, a community-driven microbiome data marketplace and tool exchange for users to integrate their own data and tools with those from the broader community.

Libra: scalable k-mer-based tool for massive all-vs-all metagenome comparisons.

Background: Shotgun metagenomics provides powerful insights into microbial community biodiversity and function. Yet, inferences from metagenomic studies are often limited by dataset size and complexity and are restricted by the availability and completeness of existing databases. De novo comparative metagenomics enables the comparison of metagenomes based on their total genetic content.

Three-dimensional Neumann-series approach to model light transport in nonuniform media.

We present the implementation, validation, and performance of a three-dimensional (3D) Neumann-series approach to model photon propagation in nonuniform media using the radiative transport equation (RTE). The RTE is implemented for nonuniform scattering media in a spherical harmonic basis for a diffuse-optical-imaging setup. The method is parallelizable and implemented on a computing system consisting of NVIDIA Tesla C2050 graphics processing units (GPUs).