Automating microbial taxonomy workflows with PHANTASM: PHylogenomic ANalyses for the TAxonomy and Systematics of Microbes

The nucleotide sequences of 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes have been used to inform the taxonomic placement of prokaryotes for several decades. Whole-genome approaches can better resolve evolutionary relationships of organisms, but these analyses often require computational proficiencies that are uncommon among microbiologists. PHANTASM is a new tool capable of automating these workflows. This tool was designed to work for a wide range of prokaryotes and is the first example of an automated reconciliation of NCBI’s Taxonomy database with that of the List of Prokaryotic names with Standing in Nomenclature (LPSN). In this study, we describe the workflow of PHANTASM and provide several examples of results generated by it. The source code is freely-available on GitHub. In order to facilitate the ease-of-access for researchers, PHANTASM is also available as a Docker image. While other tools exist to facilitate starting points for these analyses, PHANTASM provides users with a greater degree of control and produces outputs that can be used to make publication-quality figures.