microbetag: simplifying microbial network interpretation through annotation, enrichment tests, and metabolic complementarity analysis

Microbial co-occurrence network inference is often hindered by low accuracy and tool dependency. We introduce microbetag , a comprehensive software ecosystem designed to annotate microbial networks. Nodes, representing taxa, are enriched with phenotypic traits, while edges are enhanced with metabolic complementarities, highlighting potential cross-feeding relationships. microbetag ’s online version relies on microbetagDB , a database of 34,608 annotated representative genomes. microbetag can be applied to custom (metagenome-assembled) genomes via its stand-alone version. MGG , a Cytoscape app designed to support microbetag , offers a streamlined, user-friendly interface for network retrieval and visualization. microbetag effectively identified known metabolic interactions and serves as a robust hypothesis-generating tool.