Dear All,

I am working on human gut microbial metagenome analysis.

I wonder if the 'canonical correspondence analysis' technique, which is widely used in ecological studies, could be used to explore the effects of environmental variables on microbial pathway abundances. Which means, sites = sample ID, species = pathways and their abundances in each sample, environmental variables = various anthropometric data such as BMI, age, protein intake....

I assume if a pathway-abundance table and an environmental-variables table are provided, CCA would not care if it is a species abundance table or a pathway abundance table.

I look forward to your suggestions.