4. COMPARISON WITH OTHER AVAILABLE SOFTWARE PROGRAMS
Alternative web servers propose subsets of the Ocean Barcode Atlas functionalities, but to the best of our knowledge none offer such tight taxon (or sequence) diversity integration with environmental context across multiple metabarcode datasets.
Authors of the MicrobiomeAnalyst tool (https://www.microbiomeanalyst.ca; Dhariwal et al., 2017) carried out a comparison between several web-based tools such as METAGEN-assist, EBI Metagenomics, MG-RAST and VAMPS. However in the extensive set of features proposed by MicrobiomeAnalyst, several modules were developed specifically for human and mouse models and are thus not suitable for the analysis of marine barcodes. However VAMPS allows to give access to marine datasets but a prior registration is needed and the data is a bite complex to query for a non-expert user.
In contrast, GLOSSary (http://bioinfo.szn.it/glossary/; Tangherlini et al., 2018) is specifically tailored for marine data, but only allows users to query the Tara 16S miTAGs dataset with interactive geographic exploration of prokaryotic sequences or taxon, but abundance, diversity indexes, and environmental parameters are lacking.