Creating a representative taxa bar plot for multiple samples?

[colinbrislawn (Colin J Brislawn)]

Hi

@Nicholas_Bokulich

It sounds like using the action feature-table group would achieve what you describe. If you have a metadata category that describes which individual a sample came from, you can use group to collapse the feature table by group.

Note that the sample IDs will no longer be the original sample IDs, and will instead be the values from that metadata category (e.g., the individual ID). So you will need to create a new metadata file with these values as sample IDs for downstream analyses.

I often merge samples and merge ASV when making bar plots

For statistics and PCoA plots, I keep all my samples separate to preserve statistical power.