Celine MercierThe OBITools3 rely on an ad hoc database system, inside which all the data that a DNA metabarcoding experiment must consider is stored: the sequences, the metadata (describing for instance the samples), the database containing the reference sequences used for the taxonomic annotation, as well as the taxonomic databases.
DNA metabarcoding data can easily be represented in the form of tables, and each command can be regarded as an operation transforming one or several 'input' tables into one or several 'output' tables, which can be used by the next command.
The new database system used by the OBITools3 (called DMS for Data Management System) relies on column-oriented storage. Each column contains a data element, and several columns can be assembled in views representing the data tables (equivalent to a fasta file).