This bioinformatics tool is used to normalize microbial abundance data. It ensures that all samples have comparable sequencing depth, which is essential for accurate downstream ecological and diversity analyses. Normalization reduces biases caused by uneven sequencing effort across samples and allows fair comparison of microbial community composition.

The program takes a BIOM file with abundance data and a corresponding FASTA file with sequences. It randomly samples a fixed number of sequences per sample (--num-reads) or, alternatively, uses the size of the smallest sample (--sampling-by-min) to determine the sampling depth. Samples with fewer sequences than the selected threshold can optionally be deleted (--delete-samples). The process produces a new normalized BIOM file and a corresponding FASTA file containing only the retained sequences. Logs and summary HTML files are also generated for documentation and quality control.