MAAMOUL: metabolic network-based discovery of microbiome-metabolome shifts in disease

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Abstract
Motivation: A central goal in human gut microbiome research is to identify disease-associated functional shifts, an objective increasingly pursued through metagenomic and metabolomic assays. However, common differential abundance analyses of genes or metabolites often yield long and difficult-to-interpret feature lists. Aggregating features into predefined pathways can improve interpretability but relies on fixed pathway boundaries that may not reflect context-specific functional changes. Moreover, even when paired metagenomic-metabolomic data are available, they are often analyzed separately or linked only through simple statistical associations. Results: We introduce MAAMOUL, a knowledge-based computational framework that integrates metagenomic and metabolomic data to identify disease-associated, data-driven microbial metabolic modules. Leveraging prior knowledge of bacterial metabolism, MAAMOUL maps disease-association scores onto a global microbiome-wide metabolic network and identifies custom modules enriched for altered genes and metabolites. Applying MAAMOUL to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) datasets revealed significant disease-associated modules not detected by conventional pathway-level analysis. In IBD, modules reflected disrupted sulfur and aromatic amino acid metabolism and enhanced microbial nucleotide salvage, whereas in IBS they linked purine and nicotinate/nicotinamide metabolism. These results demonstrate that network-guided multi-omic integration can uncover coherent functional shifts in the gut microbiome overlooked by single-omic or purely statistical approaches. Availability and implementation: MAAMOUL is available as an R package at https://github.com/borenstein-lab/MAAMOUL.
Funding Information
  • Israel Science Foundation (2266/25)
  • National Institutes of Health (U19AG057377)
  • Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University
  • Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel-Aviv University

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