Database Commons
Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Database Profile

MEGARes

General information

URL: https://megares.meglab.org/
Full name:
Description: a hand-curated antimicrobial resistance database and annotation structure that provides a foundation for the development of high throughput acyclical classifiers and hierarchical statistical analysis of big data.
Year founded: 2017
Last update: 2016-12-01
Version:
Accessibility:
Accessible
Country/Region: United States

Classification & Tag

Data type:
Data object:
Database category:
Major species:
Keywords:

Contact information

University/Institution: University of Florida
Address: Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering
City: Gainesville
Province/State: Florida
Country/Region: United States
Contact name (PI/Team): Christina Boucher
Contact email (PI/Helpdesk): cboucher@cise.ufl.edu

Publications

31722416
MEGARes 2.0: a database for classification of antimicrobial drug, biocide and metal resistance determinants in metagenomic sequence data. [PMID: 31722416]
Doster E, Lakin SM, Dean CJ, Wolfe C, Young JG, Boucher C, Belk KE, Noyes NR, Morley PS.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a threat to global public health and the identification of genetic determinants of AMR is a critical component to epidemiological investigations. High-throughput sequencing (HTS) provides opportunities for investigation of AMR across all microbial genomes in a sample (i.e. the metagenome). Previously, we presented MEGARes, a hand-curated AMR database and annotation structure developed to facilitate the analysis of AMR within metagenomic samples (i.e. the resistome). Along with MEGARes, we released AmrPlusPlus, a bioinformatics pipeline that interfaces with MEGARes to identify and quantify AMR gene accessions contained within a metagenomic sequence dataset. Here, we present MEGARes 2.0 (https://megares.meglab.org), which incorporates previously published resistance sequences for antimicrobial drugs, while also expanding to include published sequences for metal and biocide resistance determinants. In MEGARes 2.0, the nodes of the acyclic hierarchical ontology include four antimicrobial compound types, 57 classes, 220 mechanisms of resistance, and 1,345 gene groups that classify the 7,868 accessions. In addition, we present an updated version of AmrPlusPlus (AMR ++ version 2.0), which improves accuracy of classifications, as well as expanding scalability and usability.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2020:48(D1) | 283 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)
27899569
MEGARes: an antimicrobial resistance database for high throughput sequencing. [PMID: 27899569]
Lakin SM, Dean C, Noyes NR, Dettenwanger A, Ross AS, Doster E, Rovira P, Abdo Z, Jones KL, Ruiz J, Belk KE, Morley PS, Boucher C.

Antimicrobial resistance has become an imminent concern for public health. As methods for detection and characterization of antimicrobial resistance move from targeted culture and polymerase chain reaction to high throughput metagenomics, appropriate resources for the analysis of large-scale data are required. Currently, antimicrobial resistance databases are tailored to smaller-scale, functional profiling of genes using highly descriptive annotations. Such characteristics do not facilitate the analysis of large-scale, ecological sequence datasets such as those produced with the use of metagenomics for surveillance. In order to overcome these limitations, we present MEGARes (https://megares.meglab.org), a hand-curated antimicrobial resistance database and annotation structure that provides a foundation for the development of high throughput acyclical classifiers and hierarchical statistical analysis of big data. MEGARes can be browsed as a stand-alone resource through the website or can be easily integrated into sequence analysis pipelines through download. Also via the website, we provide documentation for AmrPlusPlus, a user-friendly Galaxy pipeline for the analysis of high throughput sequencing data that is pre-packaged for use with the MEGARes database. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2017:45(D1) | 241 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)

Ranking

All databases:
276/6895 (96.012%)
Health and medicine:
70/1738 (96.03%)
276
Total Rank
487
Citations
60.875
z-index

Community reviews

Not Rated
Data quality & quantity:
Content organization & presentation
System accessibility & reliability:

Word cloud

Related Databases

Citing
Cited by

Record metadata

Created on: 2017-02-17
Curated by:
Chang Liu [2020-11-07]
Lina Ma [2017-06-15]
Shixiang Sun [2017-02-17]