On the heels of our 5000th citation, the QIIME 2 alpha release is now live and ready for testing! The best way to see where we are with QIIME 2 is to watch my SciPy 2016 presentation on QIIME 2 (the slides are available here). In this talk I give a bottom-up description of QIIME 2, and demo three different interfaces including QIIME Studio, a graphical user interface. SciPy is a scientific computing conference, so this talk is a little bit more technical than I’d give at a microbiome meeting, but I think it should be fairly accessible.
In this initial release, we’ve focused on building the underlying framework that will support QIIME 2 plugins and interfaces. As a result, the microbiome analysis functionality is fairly limited so QIIME 2 is not yet a replacement for QIIME 1. This initial release is mainly intended to get feedback from users on how QIIME 2 will be used, and to allow interested developers to start making their tools and interfaces accessible through QIIME 2. We expect the microbiome analysis functionality to start expanding quickly now. For example, one of the next things we’ll be working on is a plugin to make DADA2 accessible through QIIME that we’ll develop in collaboration with the DADA2 development team.
As always, thanks for your interest in QIIME!