Microntology: a lightweight, data-driven controlled vocabulary to describe earth’s microbial habitats
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Date
2026-05-27
Authors
Fullam, Anthony
Prasoodanan, P. K.Vishnu
Kuhn, Michael
Bork, Peer
Schmidt, Thomas S.B.
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Abstract
Motivation: Data-enabled studies of microbial ecology and evolution depend on high-quality descriptions of microbial habitats, based on curated and consolidated vocabularies. Results: We introduce microntology v1.0, a pragmatic controlled vocabulary of 148 terms to describe microbial habitats and lifestyles, and provide manually curated microntology annotations for >300k metagenomic samples from public repositories. Availability: microntology controlled vocabulary terms and term hierarchies (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.19730167), and curated annotations for 305 626 metagenomic samples (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.18164252) are available via Zenodo and spire.embl.de/downloads. Underlying code is available via github.com/grp-schmidt/microntology and Zenodo (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.20323497). User feedback, suggestions and bug reports are welcome at github.com/grp-schmidt/microntology/issues.
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© 2026, the Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords
Data-enabled studies , microbial ecology and evolution , Microbial habitats and lifestyles , [Microbiology] , [APCMicrobiome] , Statistics and Probability , Biochemistry , Molecular Biology , Computer Science Applications , Computational Theory and Mathematics , Computational Mathematics
Citation
Fullam, A, Prasoodanan, P K V, Kuhn, M, Bork, P & Schmidt, T S B 2026, 'Microntology: a lightweight, data-driven controlled vocabulary to describe earth’s microbial habitats', Bioinformatics, vol. 42, no. 6, btag343, pp. 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btag343
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