FATCAT: a focused pipeline to assess functional changes in coral-associated bacterial communities

This project will develop a Functional Annotation Tool for Coral-Associated bacterial Taxa (FATCAT) to better predict coral-associated bacterial functional profiles. FATCAT will expand beyond traditional GTDB and NCBI databases with the addition of coral-associated bacterial genomes.

There have been encouraging examples in the literature of efforts to make environment-specific databases. For example: CowPI, a functional inference tool specific to the rumen microbiome, and FAPROTAX, designed to assess microbial communities from aquatic samples.

We plan to update FATCAT in sync with the release of new coral-associated bacterial genomes. This will make FATCAT the standard to accurately predict bacterial functions from 16S rRNA gene based coral microbiome studies.