FAIR enough? Status of metabarcoding sequence read data and metadata in public archives

Public metabarcoding archives show limited FAIR compliance: only ~30% of sequencing runs have consistent metadata, over half are not linkable to a paper, and <10% of sequence files meet required formats.

• Why it matters: Reuse is constrained because sequence and metadata often fail archive submission standards, limiting interoperability and making it hard to recover environmental context and marker-gene details for downstream analyses.
• What they did: The study systematically evaluated FAIRness of publicly available metabarcoding data and checked whether sequence data files complied with archive submission requirements, focusing on retrievability and syntax compliance of key metadata fields.
• The result: Many existing datasets are likely to remain non-reusable, and the authors provide targeted suggestions for researchers, institutions, reviewers, publishers, brokers, and databases to improve sequence-data FAIRness.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.