Phage Eco-Locator: a web tool for visualization and analysis of phage genomes in metagenomic data sets

Background Bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, are the most abundant biological entities on our planet, and their nucleic acids constitute a substantial proportion of total DNA in Earth’s ecosystems [1,2]. While the advent of metagenomic methods has allowed the rapid and efficient investigation of microbial and viral communities [3-5], there has not been a comprehensive comparative analysis of phage genes and genomes present in all sequenced ecosystems [6,7]. To examine the abundance and distribution of phage genes in environmental metagenomic sequences, we developed a web-based tool, Phage Eco-Locator [http://www.phantome.org/eco-locator] that screens all publicly available sequenced metagenomes for a user-defined phage genome, or all phage genomes within a user-selected metagenomic sample.