Microbial phenotypic traits offer vital insights into microbial functions, ecology, and interactions within both natural ecosystems and human-associated environments. However, culture-based trait information remains fragmented across multiple repositories and largely unavailable for many uncultured taxa, severely limiting its potential. MetaTraits bridges this gap by sourcing and integrating culture-derived records from public databases and enriching them with genome-based trait predictions derived from isolate and metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs).
At its core, MetaTraits provides a standardized and FAIR resource that consolidates diverse microbial trait data. Supported by advanced annotation workflows, this initiative by NFDI4Microbiota streamlines trait data exploration, annotation, and integration, thereby significantly enhancing the utility of publicly available microbial trait information.
MetaTraits allows intuitive searchi at various taxonomic levels, including species, genus, and family. Our platform aggregates data from major public repositories such as: BacDive, JGI/GOLD, JGI/IMG, and BV-BRC, augmented by trait predictions for genomes from proGenomes and SPIRE.
We provide two workflowsi for annotating your microbiome data: