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To the Editor: The microbiome has emerged as a key aspect of human biology and has been implicated in many disease etiologies. Shotgun metagenomic sequencing is an approach with the highest resolution currently available for studying the taxonomic composition and functional potential of the human microbiome. The increase in publicly available shotgun data theoretically enables hypothesis testing for specific diseases and environmental niches as well as meta-analysis across related studies. However, several factors prevent the research community from taking full advantage of these resources. Barriers include the need for substantial investments of time, computational resources and specialized bioinformatic expertise as well as inconsistencies in annotation and formatting between individual studies. To overcome these challenges, we developed the curated-MetagenomicData data package (https …