5 | CONCLUSION
We present a reliable, flexible, and user-friendly software package to
create curated reference databases. CRABS successfully generated
reference databases for four widely used primer sets in metabarcoding
research, incorporating higher diversity than ecoPCR, RESCRIPt, and
MetaCurator, while also reducing computational requirements. CRABS
provides a full suite of features that allows for the generation of
curated reference databases in a limited timeframe, while facilitating
the flexibility needed to cover user’s needs. Furthermore, CRABS offers
detailed visualizations to explore the reference database for
completeness, included diversity, amplicon length variation, taxonomic
resolution of the amplicon region, and primer-binding efficiency,
enabling a high level of quality control during taxonomy assignment of
metabarcoding datasets. Such a feature set makes CRABS a powerful and
valuable tool for curated reference database creation in the rapidly
expanding field of metabarcoding.