The pervasive availability of publicly available microbial genomes has opened many new avenues for microbiology research, yet it also demands robust quality control and consistent annotation pipelines to ensure meaningful biological insights. proGenomes4 (prokaryotic Genomes v4) addresses this challenge by providing a resource of nearly 2 million high-quality microbial genomes, a doubling in scale from previous versions, encompassing over 7 billion genes. Each genome underwent rigorous quality assessment and comprehensive functional annotation by applying multiple standardized annotation workflows, including the systematic identification of mobile genetic elements and biosynthetic gene clusters. proGenomes4 contains 32 887 species with ecological habitat metadata as well as precomputed pan-genomes. This substantially expanded resource provides the microbiology community with a foundation for large-scale comparative studies and is freely accessible via a newly developed command line interface and at https://progenomes.embl.de/.

Microbes differ greatly in their organismal structure, physiology, and environmental adaptation, yet information about these phenotypic traits is dispersed across multiple databases and is largely unavailable for taxa that remain uncultured. Here, we present metaTraits, a unified and accessible trait resource that integrates culture-derived trait information from BacDive, BV-BRC, JGI IMG, and GOLD with genome-based predictions for medium and high-quality isolate and metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from proGenomes and SPIRE. metaTraits covers over 2.2 million genomes and >140 harmonized traits mapped to standardized ontologies, spanning cell morphology (e.g. shape, size, and Gram staining), physiology (e.g. motility and sporulation), metabolic and enzymatic activities, environmental preferences (e.g. temperature, salinity, and oxygen tolerance), and lifestyle categories. All records are linked to the original evidence, and species are cross-linked to NCBI and GTDB taxonomies. The interactive metaTraits website provides search and visualization tools, taxonomy-level summaries, and two workflows for annotating user-submitted genomes or community profiles. metaTraits substantially advances accessibility and interoperability of microbial trait data, enabling comprehensive trait-based analyses of microbiomes across diverse environments. metaTraits is accessible via https://metatraits.embl.de.