Huse, S.M. et al. BMC Bioinformatics 15, 41 (2014).

The field of microbial ecology experienced a boom with the rise of high-throughput methods to sample microbial sequences directly from the environment. The result has been a flood of sequence data and the need for robust analysis tools. Huse et al. describe Visualization and Analysis of Microbial Population Structure (VAMPS), a free web tool for visualizing and interpreting marker-gene sequence data (http://vamps.mbl.edu/). Users can upload data and use the VAMPS pipeline to filter, cluster and assign taxonomy to sequences through a point-and-click graphical user interface. The platform incorporates a number of tools and accommodates iterative visualization and analysis, enabling comparisons between data sets for small laboratories or larger collaborations.