Hi everyone,
We are excited to share a new plugin, q2-fungal-traits, for automated integration of fungal taxonomy derived from marker-gene amplicon (e.g., ITS, other regions) or shotgun metagenomic sequencing data with ecological and functional trait information compiled from published fungal trait datasets.
The plugin provides an annotate action that generates a metadata table containing fungal trait annotations and spore size estimates based on fungal taxonomic assignments. These annotations include information on key fungal phenotypes and traits, such as morphology and lifestyle, which can be useful for ecological inference and detection of potential contaminants in fungal microbiome datasets. This can be integrated directly into standard QIIME 2 workflows, for example to filter features based on certain trait criteria.
Documentation and usage instructions are available at:
https://library.qiime2.org/plugins/bokulich-lab/q2-fungal-traits.
To learn more about q2-fungal-traits, benefits of trait-based mycobiome analyses, and potential use cases, see our bioRxiv preprint:
Lavrinienko, A., Risch, V., Tang, C., Meyer, A., Flörl, L., Bokulich, N.A. 2026. Ecological inference and contaminant detection from fungal microbiome data with q2-fungal-traits. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.06.17.732913
If you have any questions, feedback, or bug reports, please open a new topic on the QIIME 2 Forum. We hope q2-fungal-traits will be a useful addition to your fungal microbiome analysis workflows 
Thanks,
Anton