MANTA is an integrated analysis platform that utilizes gut microbiota data and various phenotypic metadata such as diet and exercise for association analysis and visualization. MANTA aims to be an easy-to-use system for users, and allows non-bioinformatics experts to interactively extract and display data from database and analyze correlations between them. Therefore, in addition to investigating the relationship between gut microbiota data and various phenotypic data, we believe that it can be used in various ways, such as comparing the results of animal data with human data, or designing and examining the conditions of experiments. Using this MANTA system, we are conducting a variety of research, such as analyzing the relationship between lifestyle data such as diet, nutritional intake, and physical activity and gut microbiota data stored in NIBN JMD database.

Gut microbiota data includes 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and shotgun metagenomic sequencing data, which can be visualized by bar charts and heat maps for each taxonomy level. It can also output phylogenetic trees created by hierarchical clustering using Bray-Curtis or UniFrac distances. In addition, for principal coordinate analysis, it is possible to display different colors based on phenotypic metadata information such as lifestyle habits. Furthermore, it is possible to show correlations between the gut microbiota and various phenotypic metadata (Pearson, Spearman). This system has a server version and a local version, MANTA basic, that can be installed on your PC. They are free to download and use.