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a catalog of worldwide biological databases

A holistic understanding of environmental communities is the new challenge of metagenomics. Accordingly, the amplicon-based or metabarcoding approach, largely applied to investigate bacterial microbiomes, is moving to the eukaryotic world too. Indeed, the analysis of metabarcoding data may provide a comprehensive assessment of both bacterial and eukaryotic composition in a variety of environments, including human body. In this respect, whereas hypervariable regions of the 16S rRNA are the de facto standard barcode for bacteria, the Internal Transcribed Spacer 1 (ITS1) of ribosomal RNA gene cluster has shown a high potential in discriminating eukaryotes at deep taxonomic levels. As metabarcoding data analysis rely on the availability of a well-curated barcode reference resource, a comprehensive collection of ITS1 sequences supplied with robust taxonomies, is highly needed. To address this issue, we created ITSoneDB (available at http://itsonedb.cloud.ba.infn.it/) which in its current version hosts 985 240 ITS1 sequences spanning over 134 000 eukaryotic species. Each ITS1 is mapped on the NCBI reference taxonomy with its start and end positions precisely annotated. ITSoneDB has been developed in agreement to the FAIR guidelines by enabling the users to query and download its content through a simple web-interface and access relevant metadata by cross-linking to European Nucleotide Archive.

Metagenomics is providing an unprecedented access to the environmental microbial diversity. The amplicon-based metagenomics approach involves the PCR-targeted sequencing of a genetic locus fitting different features. Namely, it must be ubiquitous in the taxonomic range of interest, variable enough to discriminate between different species but flanked by highly conserved sequences, and of suitable size to be sequenced through next-generation platforms. The internal transcribed spacers 1 and 2 (ITS1 and ITS2) of the ribosomal DNA operon and one or more hyper-variable regions of 16S ribosomal RNA gene are typically used to identify fungal and bacterial species, respectively. In this context, reliable reference databases and taxonomies are crucial to assign amplicon sequence reads to the correct phylogenetic ranks. Several resources provide consistent phylogenetic classification of publicly available 16S ribosomal DNA sequences, whereas the state of ribosomal internal transcribed spacers reference databases is notably less advanced. In this review, we aim to give an overview of existing reference resources for both types of markers, highlighting strengths and possible shortcomings of their use for metagenomics purposes. Moreover, we present a new database, ITSoneDB, of well annotated and phylogenetically classified ITS1 sequences to be used as a reference collection in metagenomic studies of environmental fungal communities. ITSoneDB is available for download and browsing at http://itsonedb.ba.itb.cnr.it/.