Corresponding author: Björn Quast (
Academic editor:
Metabarcoding is a tool to routinely identify species in environmental mass-samples and thereby analyze their species composition. Using metabarcoding techniques outperforms the traditional species identification by human experts in amount, speed and quality when well curated reference data are available.
Therefore, metabarcoding can be seen as the future standard method for all biological research areas where species occurrence and distribution is in question, e.g., ecological research or monitoring projects (
A common outcome of metabarcoding research are Amplicon Sequence Variant tables (ASV,
The number and precision of taxon assignments will increase with the growth of available sequences and quality of identifications in reference databases over time (
Projects with the aim of building up species inventories on a large scale (
Currently, most ASV tables are stored as supplements to publications or in private repositories. This makes analysis across multiple research projects difficult and error prone as sequences and their taxon assignments are often not accessible. Efforts, like the European Bioinformatics Institute metagenomics with
To fill this gap, we develop an ASV Table Registry as part of the
register ASV tables and sequences upload and manage ASV tables with versioning publish ASV tables with DOIs search by sequences, taxa, and occurrence data retrieve API-based data assign taxonomic names with various tools and reference databases keep track of the applied search methods and parameters
The data life cycle of the uploaded ASV tables consists of several draft versions (each re-annotation with the identification pipeline creates a new draft version) and eventually a published version with a DOI. New draft versions can be created from the published version, then re-annotated and published again. The tracking of former taxon assignments allows researchers to re-evaluate data of former studies, compare them, and add new results. The ASV Table Registry developed here aims to make ASV tables
Future development focuses on the incorporation of the MIxS standard (
The ASV data portal is accessible at:
Christian Bräunig
TDWG 2022
The ASV Table Registry is developed within the BMBF funded Project GBOL III - Dark Taxa, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, grant ID: 01LI1901)
The ASV Table Registry is developed within the BMBF funded Project GBOL III - Dark Taxa, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, grant ID: 01LI1901)