2.3. INTERFACE AND FUNCTIONALITY
An OBA online analysis session begins with a submission interface that collects a user defined barcode sequence query. The OBA server then executes data mining procedures on dedicated high-performance hardware, and returns interactive result panels for data exploration (Figure1). A user manual is available online as well as case study example sequences (http://oba.mio.osupytheas.fr/ocean-gene-atlas/build/pdf/Ocean-Barcode-Atlas_User_Manual.pdf).
Two distinct query submission interfaces are proposed (Figure 1). On the one hand, the ”Community ecological analysis” allows the user to search for a taxonomically annotated OTU in a metabarcode dataset in order to obtain the biogeographic abundance of this taxon (world maps and bubble plots) as well as ecological analyses (alpha- and beta-diversity) in the form of graphical representations such as non-Metric multiDimensional Scaling (nMDS), scatter plots and boxplots. On the other hand, the ”Sequence based query” allows the user to interrogate a metabarcode dataset by sequence similarity in order to obtain the abundance, location and diversity of targeted sequences (barcodes) in an environmental context.