Need:

PlutoF addresses the need for curating sequence source metadata in public sequence databases (INSDC), reduces the amount of missing or incorrect data in these databases, and provides a transparent record history of annotations.

Added Value:

Third-party curation service offers the possibility for improving public sequence data and their source metadata uniformly, ensuring that researchers can work with more reliable, extensive, and standardized metadata.

Competitive Advantage:

While there might be other local data curating solutions, through operating the ELIXIR CDCH our service pushes third-party annotations back to primary repositories for public use.

A qualitative upgrade on the current use of biodiversity data:

By offering an easy-to-use online front-end for working with the data, PlutoF motivates its users to publish their data annotations, therefore making available a large amount of correcting and improving data that would otherwise be hidden in article supplementary files or as notes in users’ work files.

Exemplary Use of the Service:

Users can add third-party annotations to add the missing locality info for sequences published in a specific scientific article where the collecting locations are present in the article but not uploaded to INSDC together with sequence data. Another example would be re-identifying incorrectly identified sequences, e.g. when through BLAST searches it appears that a fungal ITS sequence was identified as coming from a plant in INSDC.

Competencies and Skills that are needed to use the Service:

Users should have a basic understanding of biodiversity and molecular data and the vocabulary used in describing these data.

Challenges for the Users:

Users may face a learning curve in familiarising themselves with the data management system PlutoF and its functionalities.

Users Role in the Service Development:

We encourage users to provide feedback and suggestions to continually refine and enhance the curation service.