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Research article2024Peer reviewedOpen access

The UNITE database for molecular identification and taxonomic communication of fungi and other eukaryotes: sequences, taxa and classifications reconsidered

Abarenkov, Kessy; Nilsson, R. Henrik; Larsson, Karl-Henrik; Taylor, Andy F. S.; May, Tom W.; Froslev, Tobias Guldberg; Pawlowska, Julia; Lindahl, Bjoern; Poldmaa, Kadri; Truong, Camille; Vu, Duong; Hosoya, Tsuyoshi; Niskanen, Tuula; Piirmann, Timo; Ivanov, Filipp; Zirk, Allan; Peterson, Marko; Cheeke, Tanya E.; Ishigami, Yui; Jansson, Arnold Tobias;
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Abstract

UNITE (https://unite.ut.ee) is a web-based database and sequence management environment for molecular identification of eukaryotes. It targets the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region and offers nearly 10 million such sequences for reference. These are clustered into similar to 2.4M species hypotheses (SHs), each assigned a unique digital object identifier (DOI) to promote unambiguous referencing across studies. UNITE users have contributed over 600 000 third-party sequence annotations, which are shared with a range of databases and other community resources. Recent improvements facilitate the detection of cross-kingdom biological associations and the integration of undescribed groups of organisms into everyday biological pursuits. Serving as a digital twin for eukaryotic biodiversity and communities worldwide, the latest release of UNITE offers improved avenues for biodiversity discovery, precise taxonomic communication and integration of biological knowledge across platforms.

Published in

Nucleic Acids Research
2024, Volume: 52, number: D1, pages: D791–D797

    Sustainable Development Goals

    SDG15 Life on land

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Bioinformatics and Systems Biology
    Biological Systematics
    Microbiology

    Publication identifier

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad1039

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/127269