mbX: An R Package for Streamlined Microbiome Analysis

Here, we introduce the mbX package: an R-based tool designed to streamline 16S rRNA gene microbiome data analysis following taxonomic classification. It automates key post-sequencing steps, including taxonomic data cleaning and visualization, addressing the need for reproducible and user-friendly microbiome workflows. mbX’s core functions, ezclean and ezviz, take raw taxonomic output (such as those from QIIME 2) and sample metadata to produce a cleaned relative abundance dataset and high-quality stacked bar plots with minimal manual intervention. We validated mbX on 14 real microbiome datasets, demonstrating significant improvements in efficiency and consistency of post-processing of DNA sequence data. The results show that mbX ensures uniform taxonomic formatting, eliminates common manual errors, and quickly generates publication-ready figures, greatly facilitating downstream analysis. For a dataset with 20 samples, both functions of mbX ran in less than 1 s and used less than 1 GB of memory. For a dataset with more than 1170 samples, the functions ran within 125 s and used less than 4.5 GB of memory. By integrating seamlessly with existing pipelines and emphasizing automation, mbX fills a critical gap between sequence classification and statistical analysis. An upcoming version will have an added function which will further extend mbX to automated statistical comparisons, aiming for an end-to-end microbiome analysis solution by integrating mbX with currently available pipelines. This article presents the design of mbX, its workflow and features, and a comparative discussion positioning mbX relative to other microbiome bioinformatics tools. The contributions of mbX highlight its significance in accelerating microbiome research through reproducible and streamlined data analysis.