taxburst: sunburst charts for taxonomy, based on Krona

taxburst is a fork of the Krona software, (see: Ondov, Bergman, and Philippy, 2011). It produces static HTML pages that provide an interactive display of a metagenomic taxonomy.

Here is an example screenshot:

Krona is a fantastic piece of software, but it has been unmaintained for a number of years. Moreover, the input parsing code is written in Perl and the default instructions require use of NCBI taxids.

The goal of taxburst is to update Krona to a maintained, documented piece of software that can be adapted and adjusted in a variety of ways. This is still alpha mode software, to be used at your own risk.

Please file bugs and feature requests on the issue tracker.

Pull requests are welcome!

Documentation

User and developer documentation is available at taxburst.github.io/taxburst/.

Examples

Here are some examples of (interactive!) taxburst plots:

• SRR11125891.SingleM.html - displaying the results of singlem pipe on SRR11125891, a pig gut microbiome.
• SRR11125891.summarized.html - sourmash taxonomic breakdown on SRR11125891.
• SRR11125891.tax_annotate.html - genome-resolution taxonomic breakdown of SRR11125891.

Install

Via pypi

pip install taxburst

or from bioconda

conda create -n taxburst -c bioconda taxburst
conda activate taxburst

Example command lines

All data files are available in the GitHub repository under examples/.

Using sourmash tax metagenome output - summary_csv format

An example using the summary_csv format from sourmash tax metagenome (see tax metagenome docs),

taxburst examples/SRR11125891.summarized.csv \
    -o SRR11125891.summarized.html

then open SRR11125891.summarized.html in a browser.

Using sourmash tax annotate output

An example using the with-lineages format from sourmash tax annotate (see tax annotate docs

taxburst -F tax_annotate \
    examples/SRR11125891.t0.gather.with-lineages.csv \
    -o SRR11125891.tax_annotate.html

then open SRR11125891.tax_annotate.html in a browser.

Using singleM pipe output

An example using the profile format from singlem pipe (see singlem pipe docs):

taxburst -F singleM \
    examples/SRR11125891.singleM.profile.tsv \
    -o SRR11125891.singleM.html

then open SRR11125891.singleM.html in a browser.

Background and history

Krona is a super cool way to explore taxonomic breakdowns of metagenomes. But it's kind of old, and isn't being actively maintained. Moreover, it doesn't work easily with GTDB or other non-NCBI taxonomies.

So, why not grab the JavaScript code and rewrite the preprocessing code?

Voila! 'taxburst'!

I'd call it Krona2 or something, but the licensing for Krona prohibits that, to my understanding. Hence, 'taxburst'.

Citation information

When using taxburst, please cite the Krona paper: Interactive metagenomic visualization in a Web browser, Ondov et al., 2011.

CTB July 2025

ctbrown@ucdavis.edu