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.