Standard method to merge Taxonomy and Feature/ASV data

[Nicholas_Bokulich]

Welcome to the forum, @Rob_DNA ! Also welcome to QIIME 2

@Rob_DNA

I've also found the following code on here the forum:

Thanks for pulling up that example — that is what I would recommend as the solution to your request as well.

@Rob_DNA

The format looks quite good in the HTML viewer

@Rob_DNA

but this again is merely a visualization .qzv file. I'd like to get a .qza file etc that I can export to .xlsx or something.

Good news! This is already possible from without the visualization. There is a button at the top of the page to "Download Metadata TSV File". This file can be opened in excel or similar as is (spreadsheet programs all have TSV importers). You could then save as a .xlsx if you want to add any rich formatting etc in excel.

Technically this can also be done programmatically if you are looking to avoid a manual download step (but if you want a programmatic solution then I recommend using QIIME 2's python API to load and view the artifacts as a DataFrame to give maximal control for merging, subsetting, etc).

A QZA would not be practical, because this is an unusual format and would not be interoperable with any downstream software, so defining a special QZA format would make a "dead end" that requires addiitonal steps to process/visualize anyway.

Note: metadata tabulate can be used to merge several metadata-viewable objects into a single QZV.. so you could, e.g., chain together sequences or other feature information as well.

Good luck!