FAPROTAX2-db: A database of experimentally validated bacterial and archaeal metabolic functions

Systematically collected records of experimentally verified microbial phenotypes are essential for properly interpreting these sequencing data in an ecological context, but existing databases of microbial phenotypes, including the widely used FAPROTAX, are either limited in taxonomic and ecological scope or are outdated.

Here, we present the FAPROTAX2-db (Functional Annotation of PROkaryotic TAXa version 2) database, an overhaul of the original version that features a dramatically improved taxonomic breadth and resolution, reduced taxonomic and environmental bias, and additional metabolic functions. FAPROTAX2-db contains presence/absence data for >15,600 cultured prokaryotic species across 101 ecologically important functions, manually compiled from the experimental literature.