The top level README.md already provides a good high-level overview of the project.
Loculus is a software package to power microbial genomial databases.
This is an overview of important use cases:
Users don't need to authenticate (given the Loculus instance is public) to view sequences and metadata. However, they need to authenticate to upload data (we call those users "submitters"). A user is potentially anyone who is interested in the data, e.g. a researcher, a public health official, or a member of the public. Submitters will likely be researchers or lab technicians who generate the data.
A maintainer is a person (or group of people) who hosts a Loculus instance. Depending on the needs, we imagine that Loculus could be used for example in the following scenarios:
- a globally available database (like Pathoplexus),
- a database for a research group to share the data that they generate,
- a platform to process and analyse data from INSDC.