2025/09/22 by Haris Zafeiropoulos, Ermis Ioannis Michail Delopoulos, Andi Erega +4 · 1 voice
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks #Microbial Metabolic Engineering and Bioproduction #Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1186/s13059-025-03769-2
Microbial co-occurrence network inference is often hindered by low accuracy and tool dependency. We introduce microbetag, a comprehensive software ecosystem designed to annotate microbial networks. Nodes, representing taxa, are enriched with phenotypic traits, while edges are enhanced with metabolic complementarities, highlighting potential cross-feeding relationships. microbetag's online version relies on microbetagDB, a database of 34,608 annotated representative genomes. microbetag can be applied to custom (metagenome-assembled) genomes via its stand-alone version. MGG, a Cytoscape app designed to support microbetag, offers a streamlined, user-friendly interface for network retrieval and visualization. microbetag effectively identified known metabolic interactions and serves as a robust hypothesis-generating tool.