Coral Microbiome Portal

Our laboratory has created a ‘Coral Microbiome Portal’, an on-line, freely accessible and user-friendly platform that will facilitate analysis of microbial sequence data from corals.

We envision that this portal will allow our community to compare and contrast the microbiomes of corals across species and reefs, and link the sequence data to available metadata.  This portal may be especially useful for researchers lacking their own computational resources.

We are currently using the Marine Biological Laboratory’s VAMPS infrastructure and support for this portal, which contains helpful tools for visualizing and analyzing the data.  The portal currently contains bacterial and archaeal SSU rRNA gene amplicon sequence data from 8 studies, and we have linked in 5 related studies (including eukaryote sequences from reef waters).

You are welcome to create an account on the portal, upload new data (and keep it private until publication, if desired), and use this database to complement your own analyses.   Alternatively, the sequences can be easily exported for use in your own analyses.

Please feel free to use the portal and contribute new data (upload guidelines provided).  Our community has the option of adding additional features to our portal, and I welcome your feedback on these features.

Thanks to MIT student Evan Denmark for his work on this project and NSF OCE-1233612 for support!