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rDNA ITS based identification of Eukaryotes and their communication via DOIs
Curation of DNA sequences

Third-party annotations are a valuable resource to improve the quality of public DNA sequences. For example, sequences in International Nucleotide Sequence Databases Collaboration (INSDC) often lack important features like taxon interactions, species level identification, information associated with material source, habitat, country, geolocation, etc.

PlutoF offers a third-party curation service to improve the quality of public DNA sequences and their source metadata (read the related ARPHA Preprint in Research Ideas and Outcomes). UNITE Community is using these services to annotate and improve the quality of INSDC rDNA Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) sequence datasets. In collaboration with EMBL-EBI, improved or corrected annotations on INSD sequences in PlutoF are fed back to primary repositories through operating the ELIXIR Contextual Data ClearingHouse (CDCH).

Searching and browsing of third-party annotations introduced by the UNITE Community can be done via ELIXIR CDCH RESTful API or using search interfaces of PlutoF and UNITE.


Curations by the UNITE community members

Curations by the UNITE community members

Number of taxonomic re-annotations 170 128
Number specifications of EcM lineage 256 653
Number of specifications of country of collection 107 811
Number of specifications of host and interacting taxa 55 156
Number of chimeras excluded 4 071
Number of low-quality sequences excluded 9 151
Number of sequences with specimen/culture metadata annotated 10 495
Number of sequences linked to type specimen/culture 4 900
Number of sequences flagged with type status 23 542

Curations sent to EMBL-EBI / ENA

Number of taxonomic re-annotations2 067
Number of specifications of location6 421
Number of specifications of type status225

Browse curations

Third-party annotations can be searched and browsed on UNITE Search Pages