Request for Geographic Information from the mOTUs Database

[yuhancheXX]

Dear Professor

I hope this message finds you well. I recently had the honor of reading your insightful article published in "Nucleic Acids Research" titled, "The mOTUs Online Database Provides Web-Accessible Genomic Context to Taxonomic Profiling of Microbial Communities". I must say, this paper is at the forefront of microbial ecology research, and the database you’ve developed is both comprehensive and convincing. I believe it will be an invaluable resource for the scientific community.

As part of my own research, I would like to incorporate some of the information from your database. However, I noticed that the geographic information of the data sources is not included, which is crucial to my study. Could you kindly provide this information or direct me to where I might be able to access it?

Thank you very much for taking the time to read my email. As a student just beginning my scientific journey, I deeply appreciate your guidance and any assistance you can offer. I cannot express enough how grateful I am for your help!

[hjruscheweyh]

Dear @yuhancheXX

Happy to hear that the resource is useful for you. There is currently no geographic information for datasets as proper curation requires a lot of manual work. What you can do is to use the biosample identifiers in the metadata and search at ENA/NCBI for coordinates. In most cases these coordinates will be accurate. But the devil is in the 10% where they're not.

@samuelmiver could you sure your script with which you harvest metadata for biosamples?

[hjruscheweyh]

We're working on adding coordinates of samples/MAGs to the mOTUs database. Will be added the the mOTUs profiler release later this year