What microorganisms live in our belly buttons? The Rob Dunn Lab dives into the mysteries of the belly button microflora to find out.
The Belly Button Biodiversity dashboard interactively shows the most common microorganisms (particularly prokaryotes) isolated from the belly buttons of 153 volunteers and identified through DNA sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene.
It shows the most common prokaryotes in all volunteers and also per volunteer. Pie charts exhibit the proportions (%) of the top 10 "organised taxonomic units" (OTUs). Bubble charts provide a different perspective as the bubble sizes indicate the concentrations of each OTU against 19 others.
Both pie and bubble charts are interactive. Meanwhile, static graphs are meant to visualise the metadata obtained from the volunteers: the age and the wash frequency distributions of the cohort; a comparison of genders and ethnicities of participants, and participant levels in events. A scatterplot reveals that there is poor correlation between age and wash frequency among volunteers.
Head over to the project wiki for documentation of the full-stack development. The deployed dashboard, on the other hand, can be accessed at https://still-brook-99773.herokuapp.com/.