cannot go deeper to the 6th or 7th layer

[Louise H]

Hi,

I'm new to Phinch. I have managed to add metadata to my .biom on qiime and then converted to a JSON format. This uploaded well but on the graphs it won't let me see any more detail than the Phylum level. It says ' 709 unique paths, cannot go deeper to the 6th or 7th layer '. I wonder if someone could help me with this.

Many thanks

[Holly Bik]

Hi Louise,

Because of computational limitations, on some visualizations you won't be able to go down to Genus or Species level (I would test this out by clicking down from highest to lowest taxon, Phylum --> Class --> Order, etc. to see how far down you can go). 

Phinch looks at the size of the file you upload and determines whether or not the web server can handle the complete taxonomic strings (you can't go deep down in levels if you have a massive BIOM file with lot of OTUs for example); if the file is too big then visualizing the lower levels get disabled.

Can you also check to confirm that your taxonomy metadata is embedded in your JSON file, and that the information in your file looks something like this:

{"taxonomy": ["k__Bacteria", "p__Firmicutes", "c__Bacilli", "o__Bacillales", "f__Planococcaceae", "g__Planomicrobium", "s__"]}}

If the taxonomy is formatted differently (e.g. missing the k__, etc. prefixes), then that might explain the problem.

Let me know if that works.

Holly