FishTaco Functional Shifts’ Taxonomic Contributors is the name of a new software program that aims to analyze your microbiome to deliver greater insights into your personal health. Here’s our review.
What is FishTaco?
FishTaco is the shortened name of the service officially called Functional Shifts’ Taxonomic Contributors. If you mash the first few letters of each of the four words together, you get “FishTaco”.
FishTaco is a software program designed to analyze and understand our microbiome – which is the name for all of the bacteria that make up our body. Modern medical research has increasingly shown just how important our microbiome is to our overall health and wellness.
In a recent study from the University of Washington, researchers demonstrated that their FishTaco technology can “reveal how much different bacterial species contribute to disease-associated functional imbalances in the microbiome”.
In order to prove that point, researchers combined the two most common ways we assess the human microbiome, including:
- Taxonomic Approach
- Functional Approach
By combining these two approaches into one single methodology, FishTaco can provide greater insights into our health data.
Or, as the creators of FishTaco explain it, “FishTaco is a metagenomic computational framework, aiming to identify the taxa that are driving the functional shifts we observe in microbiomes of different individuals or disease states.”
FishTaco has been making headlines in recent days for its enormous potential in the future research towards deadly diseases and illnesses.
How the FishTaco Study Worked
After developing FishTaco, researchers at the University of Washington demonstrated that their platform could be used to assess what bacteria are doing to certain parts of your body.
The method, according to researcher Elhanan Borenstein, “allows us to pinpoint which microbial species in our microbiome are responsible for each functional imbalance so they can be targeted for therapy”.
How did researchers prove this point? Well, they tested the microbiomes of patients with type 2 diabetes and inflammatory bowel diseases. Researchers were able to see the taxa (the groups of organisms) responsible for these diseases. They could also see “functional imbalances” between populations. Researchers believe these imbalances are linked to the types of bacteria species in your digestive tract.
The study was published in Cell Host & Microbe in January 2017. Analysts are expecting it to pave the way for microbiome research in the future.
How to Use FishTaco
The FishTaco software is freely available online. The source code can be found on GitHub here.
The software is being distributed under a non-commercial license. If you’re using it for commercial use, then you’ll need to contact the author.
FishTaco is obviously a very resource-intensive software program. By default, it runs in a multi-taxa mode. However, you can drop it to single taxa mode to improve performance and speed up your analysis.
Other FAQs about using FishTaco yourself can be found here.
Why is FishTaco Important?
FishTaco is important because it helps us connect the reasons different people survive different diseases.
Within each of our bodies are trillions of microbes. These microbes live inside and outside our bodies. Altogether, these microbes are called our “microbiome” or the “human microbiome”. These bacteria have a powerful impact on our health.
Researchers have recently shown that changing the composition of bacterial communities in your intestines can lead to metabolic imbalances, for example, including imbalances that are linked with obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, autoimmune diseases, and certain neurological conditions.
In layman’s terms, this shows that we may be able to prevent or treat deadly diseases – including cancer and diabetes – with simple dietary changes or microbiome changes.
The challenge, up to now, has been organizing all of this microbiome data into something that’s usable. We have trillions of bacteria spread across the human population in a nearly infinite number of combinations.
FishTaco organizes all that data in a usable way, via a software program.
The senior author of the latest microbiome study, Elhanan Borenstein, has previously studied the human microbiome while developing software programs to model, analyze, and integrate microbiome data. He partnered with Ohad Manor, a former postdoctoral fellow in his lab, to spearhead the development of the project.
Ultimately, FishTaco will help us understand how microbiomes fight diseases. Then, we can use that data to discover how to change the microbiome. That’s why FishTaco is so important.
