Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 29, 2026

Characterizing Microbiome Dynamics – Flow Cytometry Based Workflows from Pure Cultures to Natural Communities
Published on: July 12, 2018
microntology: a lightweight, data-driven controlled vocabulary to describe earth's microbial habitats
Anthony Fullam1, Vishnu Prasoodanan Pk2, Michael Kuhn1
1Molecular Systems Biology Unit, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany.
Motivation:
Data-enabled studies of microbial ecology and evolution depend on high-quality descriptions of microbial habitats, based on curated and consolidated vocabularies.
Results:
We introduce microntology v1.0, a pragmatic controlled vocabulary of 148 terms to describe microbial habitats and lifestyles, and provide manually curated microntology annotations for >300k metagenomic samples from public repositories.
Availability:
microntology controlled vocabulary terms and term hierarchies (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.19730167), and curated annotations for 305 626 metagenomic samples (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.18164252) are available via Zenodo and spire.embl.de/downloads. Underlying code is available via github.com/grp-schmidt/microntology and Zenodo (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.20323497). User feedback, suggestions and bug reports are welcome at github.com/grp-schmidt/microntology/issues.
Related Concept Videos
Introduction to Microbial Ecology
Microbial Classification System
Methods to Assess Microbial Communities
Microenvironments
Soil Microbial Ecology
Environmental Applications of Microorganisms

