Back

A community-curated, global atlas of Bacillus cereus sensu lato genomes for epidemiological surveillance

Ramnath, V.; Larralde, M.; Menchik, P.; Buehler, A. J.; Harrand, A. S.; Chung, T.; Wei, X.; Raghuram, V.; Gourle, H.; Pierneef, R.; Matle, I.; Aspholm, M.; Andersson, M.; Cheng, R. A.; Kovac, J.; Henriksson, J.; Carroll, L. M.

2023-12-21 microbiology
10.1101/2023.12.20.572685 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The ability to cause foodborne illness, anthrax, and other infections has been attributed to numerous lineages within Bacillus cereus sensu lato (s.l.). However, existing pathogen surveillance databases facilitate dangerous pathogen misidentifications when applied to B. cereus s.l., potentially hindering outbreak or bioterrorism attack response efforts. To address this, we developed BTyperDB (www.btyper.app), an atlas of B. cereus s.l. genomes with standardized, community-curated metadata. BTyperDB aggregates all publicly available B. cereus s.l. genomes (including >2,600 previously unassembled genomes) with novel genomes donated by laboratories around the world, nearly doubling the number of publicly available B. cereus s.l. genomes. To showcase its utility for pathogen surveillance, we use BTyperDB to identify emerging anthrax toxin- and capsule-harboring lineages. Overall, our study provides insight into the epidemiology of an under-studied group of emerging pathogens and highlights the benefits of inclusive, community-driven metadata FAIRification efforts.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.