MetaHiCNet: a web server for normalizing and visualizing microbial Hi-C interaction networks.

Authors

Chentong Sun, Zhen Qin, Ruishan Liu, Yuanxiong Guo, Yong Ge, Yuxuan Du

Published in

Nucleic acids research. Apr 26, 2025. Epub Apr 26, 2025.

Abstract

Metagenomic Hi-C (metaHi-C) enables the reconstruction of microbial genome organization and interspecies interactions by capturing physical contacts between genomic fragments. However, raw metaHi-C data are often confounded by systematic biases and spurious contacts, which can obscure meaningful biological signals. Existing metaHi-C pipelines typically lack user-friendly normalization workflows and intuitive visualization tools, limiting the ability to explore microbial interaction networks. Here, we introduce MetaHiCNet, a web-based platform that supports widely used normalization methods with customizable parameters. MetaHiCNet provides a stepwise workflow for bias correction, spurious contact removal, and interactive visualization of microbial interactions. The platform supports multiple visualization modes, including taxonomic treemaps, cross-taxa networks, and cross-bin networks, enabling seamless transitions from community-wide overviews to detailed analyses of specific taxa or bins. This functionality facilitates the investigation of host-microbe interactions and the relationships between mobile genetic elements and their microbial hosts, offering deeper insights into microbial community structures and dynamics. MetaHiCNet is freely accessible at www.metahicnet.com without login.

PMID:
40287822
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 27 Apr 2025.

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