MG-RAST, an open-source web application server, facilitates automatic phylogenetic and functional analysis of metagenomes. It stands as one of the largest repositories for metagenomic data, employing the acronym for Metagenomic Rapid Annotations using Subsystems Technology (MG-RAST). This platform utilizes a pipeline that automatically assigns functions to metagenomic sequences, conducting sequence comparisons at both nucleotide and amino acid levels. Users benefit from phylogenetic and functional insights into the analyzed metagenomes, along with tools for comparing different datasets. MG-RAST also offers a RESTful API for programmatic access.
Argonne National Laboratory from the University of Chicago created and maintains this server. As of December 29, 2016, MG-RAST had analyzed a substantial 60 terabase-pairs of data from over 150,000 datasets. Notably, more than 23,000 of these datasets are publicly available. Computational resources are currently sourced from the DOE Magellan cloud at Argonne National Laboratory, Amazon EC2 Web services, and various traditional clusters.