The ASV registry: a place for ASVs to be

Despite the effectiveness of DNA metabarcoding for gaining insights into biodiversity and environmental species composition, a centralized management and storage option including easy accessibility of already published data is lacking. Since most data is published as supplementary material or in private repositories, DNA metabarcoding has a huge untapped potential to be used for analysis across multiple taxa, sample locations or multiple research projects. We developed a platform to register, manage and identify amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) or zero-radius OTUs (ZOTUs), respectively, against several barcode reference datasets. Moreover, ASV tables can be uploaded, managed, versioned, and published with DOIs thus contributing to the full research Data Life Cycle.