Database

Reliable and up-to-date databases play a pivotal role in reference-based detection of antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) in bacteria. Nonetheless, these databases differ in their content and quality, making it challenging to decide an appropriate reference database for a particular research project. In order to address this challenge, this post offers a review of several ARG databases that are publicly available and widely used in bacterial genomics. Particularly, I focus on databases that are still undergoing regular maintenance, and I do not discuss any program released with these databases for sequence search or statistical analysis.

Solventogenic clostridia offer a promising and sustainable alternative to petroleum-based production of butanol — an important industrial chemical feedstock and fuel additive or replacement¹. They also draw our attention for their potential in reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and relieving the threat of global warming. It is of paramount importance to elucidate the metabolism of clostridia for metabolism engineering and industrial applications of gas fermentation. In addition to standard experimental approaches, bioinformatics provides us with an efficient way to identify targets (genetic or biochemical) that can be controlled to improve the product formation. In this post, I briefly summarise bioinformatic resources that are publicly accessible to date for interrogating clostridial metabolism.