---
title: What is Loculus?
description: A brief description of Loculus
---

Loculus is a software package to power microbial genomic databases. Major features include:

- Upload and storage of consensus sequences, metadata and files using a simple web interface or a web API
- Flexible data preprocessing: Loculus comes with a [Nextclade](https://clades.nextstrain.org)-based preprocessing pipeline that is able to align and translate sequences, but it is also easy to implement and plug-in your own pipeline using custom tools.
- Powerful searches: Loculus provides a user-friendly interface to search and view sequences as well as an API to query the data using [LAPIS](https://github.com/GenSpectrum/LAPIS) in the backend.
- Highly configurable: The list of metadata fields is fully configurable and Loculus supports both single- and multi-segmented genomes.

Loculus aims to be widely useful to groups who need to manage sequencing data. It can be used by small public health or research laboratories with a few members for storing their own, internal data as well as by international databases facilitating global pathogen sequence sharing.
