Gneiss - Meaning of "yx" (e.g. y0, y1) in balances.qza

[Tjelve]

Hello everybody,

this might be a stupid questions, but at the moment, i don’t get the right answer by myself.

tl; dr: What is the exact meaning of “y0” (or “y1” etc.) in the balance.qza?

I’m going through your tutorial for gneiss to check if this methods fits with my data.
Therefore i converted my OTU-table (generetard with Qiime 1.9.1) into a biom-file and after that into a qza-file.

Within the tutorial i also re-converted all other files back to tsv/txt-files to understand what exactly was done in this step.

I also did this with the balances.qza and noticed that there were less rows than before.
I don’t have the best mathematical background to understand the exact meaning of this but i guess the “yx” is the (somehow) comparison between e.g. OTU 1 and OTU 2…?

Maybe someone might enlighten me?

Thanks for your support and
best regards
Chris

[mortonjt (Jamie Morton)]

Hi @Tjelve,

We have an explanation of these variables on the bottom of this tutorial

Are there any specific issues with the tutorial that don’t make sense?

[Tjelve]

Hi @mortonjt,

thanks for your reply!

I found the explanation this morning but this is only about numerators and denominators.
The output from the balances.qza does not have a specification about that, haven’t it?

So i suppose the y0 (from the balance.qza) is the entirety of y0_numerators_ and y0_denominators_…?

The idea was to export this data and do some further analyses with e.g. Primer7.

Cheers!
Chris

[mortonjt (Jamie Morton)]

That’s correct. The balances.qza doesn’t have the specification of the numerator / denominator builtin. The balance-taxonomy command is meant to help with the interpretation of each of the balances, by listing the numerator and denominator features. Within this command you should be able to download the list of numerator and denominator taxa.

[Tjelve]

Hi @mortonjt,

thanks for your answer and support.

I’m playing with the balances to do some further analyses and it seems it worked out quite well.

Second questions added in a new topic.

Best regards
Chris

[thermokarst]

Hi @Tjelve, can you please post that question as a new topic on the forum? Feel free to edit your post above to remove the question from this thread, if you decide to post a new topic. Thanks!