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.