TaxonKit: a cross-platform and efficient NCBI taxonomy toolkit

Abstract SummaryTaxonKit is a command-line toolkit for rapid manipulation of NCBI taxonomy data. It provides executable binary files for major operating systems including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and can be directly used without any dependencies nor local database buiding. TaxonKit demonstrates competitive performance in execution time compared to similar tools. The efficiency, scalability, and usability of TaxonKit enable researchers to rapidly investigate taxonomy data. AvailabilityTaxonkit is implemented in Go programming language. It is open-source and freely available for download and use from https://github.com/shenwei356/taxonkit.