Abstract
16S rRNA amplicon sequencing provides a relatively cheap culture-independent method for studying the microbial world. Thousands of studies have examined microbial populations in various habitats, yet a global pan-microbiome perspective integrating these studies is still missing. Here we introduce dbBact, an open wiki-like bacterial knowledge base that combines information from hundreds of studies across diverse habitats, creating a collaborative central repository amenable to subsequent analysis. 16S rRNA amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) are manually extracted from each study and assigned multiple ontology-based terms. dbBact currently contains about 850 studies, covering more than 1,300,000 associations between 315,000 ASVs and 3,500 ontology terms. We demonstrate how dbBact can lead to better understanding of underlying bacterial communities and the formulation of novel biological hypotheses. dbBact can be accessed using a website (http://dbbact.org), plugins for qiime2 and Calour, and programmatically, using a REST-API.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.