taxburst documentation¶

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

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 beta mode software, to be used at your own risk.

Here is an example screenshot:

example output screenshot

Input formats¶

taxburst v0.3.0 (Aug 2025) has parsers for the following formats:

sourmash tax annotate and csv_summary outputs;
SingleM profile output;
Krona format;
nested dictionaries in JSON;

Please file an issue if you need support for an additional format!

Support and help¶

Please file bugs and feature requests on the issue tracker.

Pull requests are welcome!

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.
SRR11125891.krona.html - krona-format input parsing output (produced by sourmash tax metagenome).

The input formats behind these taxburst plots can be found in examples/ folder in the top level of the git repo. The README in that directory contains some minimal documentation on how the examples were created.

Install¶

taxburst is available on the Python Package Index (PyPI) under pypi.org/project/taxburst.

To install it, run:

pip install taxburst

It is also available on Bioconda.

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

Authors¶

The original Krona software was developed by Brian Ondov, Nicholas Bergman, and Adam Philippy.

taxburst is developed by Titus Brown. The HTML format is largely unchanged, but the parsing front-end and output mechanisms have been completely rewritten in Python, and enhanced output validation has been added.

You can contact Titus at ctbrown@ucdavis.edu if needed, but please use the issue tracker as much as possible :).

Citation information¶

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