MICOM is a Python package for metabolic modeling of microbial communities currently developed in the Gibbons Lab at the Institute for Systems Biology and the Human Systems Biology Group of Prof. Osbaldo Resendis Antonio at the National Institute of Genomic Medicine Mexico.

MICOM allows you to construct a community model from a list on input COBRA models and manages exchange fluxes between individuals and individuals with the environment. It explicitly accounts for different abundances of individuals in the community and can thus incorporate data from biomass quantification, cytometry, ampliconsequencing, or metagenomic shotgun sequencing.

It identifies a relevant flux space by incorporating an ecological model for the trade-off between individual taxa growth and community-wide growth that shows good agreement with experimental data.

MICOM is published in

MICOM: Metagenome-Scale Modeling To Infer Metabolic Interactions in the Gut Microbiota
Christian Diener, Sean M. Gibbons, Osbaldo Resendis-Antonio
mSystems 5:e00606-19
https://doi.org/10.1128/mSystems.00606-19

Please cite this publication when referencing MICOM. Thanks 😄

MICOM is available on PyPi and can be installed via

pip install micom

For more info on the installation or setting up the solvers please see the documentation .

Documentation can be found at https://micom-dev.github.io/micom .

General questions on usage can be asked in Github Discussions

https://github.com/micom-dev/micom/discussions

We are also available on the cobrapy Gitter channel

https://gitter.im/opencobra/cobrapy

Questions specific to the MICOM Qiime2 plugin (q2-micom) can also be asked on the Qiime2 forum

https://forum.qiime2.org/c/community-plugin-support/