Data Visualization

Here’s your chance to “see” and interact with data from the Wild Life of Our Homes project. We’ll use this space to post and update datasets and visualization tools as they become available.

Personal Household Results

Participants can access personal results for surfaces in their homes whose microbes (bacteria and archaea) have been sequenced to date.

If you are a Wild Life of Our Homes participant, sign into WildHomes.org (our Project Participant Site) with your username and password. Select the ‘Ready to Share Data with You’ hyperlink to view available pie charts.

Explore Whole Datasets

[bacteria and archaea, fungi]

We recommend using Phinch — an interactive framework for visualizing large biological datasets– to explore the Wild Life of Our Homes datasets. Please note that it runs exclusively online in the Google Chrome browser.

First, check out this video tutorial that the Phinch team prepared to walk you through using Phinch:

Next, download the specially formatted data files called BIOM files (below) to your desktop. These files contain information about the ‘species’ of microbes – also known as Operational Taxonomic Units or OTUs – detected in the analyses of home samples as well as select descriptive information (known as metadata) about the homes where samples were collected.

The BIOM files we’re sharing right now are based on analyses from the inner and outer doorframes of 1000 homes (Bacteria and Archaea Download and Fungi Download) and the Belly Button Biodiversity project (Belly Button Microbiome Download). We’ll add more files as data become available.

Load a BIOM file into Phinch and explore away using the five different visualization tools. Try to understand which species live where and why – the potential for discovery is endless.

And please, do consider sharing your findings with us. Drop us a note as we’d love to hear about them!

Special thanks to Holly Bik and the Phinch design team for helping to make the Wild Life of Our Homes datasets (both bacteria and archaea and fungi) available for exploration and visualization.