taxburst 0.1.4

sunburst plots for taxonomy

taxburst: sunburst charts for taxonomy, based on Krona

WARNING: alpha mode software. Use at your own risk.

This is an update of Krona, written with the following goals in mind:

• liberate tax displays from the tyranny of NCBI taxonomy IDs and taxdump;
• support dynamic generation of Krona-style plots;
• rewrite in modern Python;
• support ~nicer multi-stage generation of XHTML;
• probably other things;

The output HTML is based on https://github.com/marbl/Krona.

All bugs are mine until proven otherwise.

Please file bugs and feature requests on the issue tracker.

Examples

A small example - a test data set.

A bigger example - SRR606249 against known reference genomes.

A screenshot:

Install

pip install taxburst

Run

taxburst examples/small.tax.csv -o small.tax.html

then open small.tax.html in a browser.

Currently the only input format accepted is the csv_summary format from sourmash tax metagenome (see docs), but that is pretty easy to change.

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'.

CTB July 2025 [e-mail]