Our preprint describing BTyperDB, our community-curated, global atlas of Bacillus cereus group genomes, was posted on bioRxiv today! 🥳🧬🌍

We developed BTyperDB because we noticed that existing pathogen genome databases were inadequate–and potentially dangerous!–when used for B. cereus group surveillance. We decided to construct our own database by assembling THOUSANDS of novel B. cereus group genomes; this allowed us to nearly double the number of publicly available B. cereus group genomes! Not only that, curators around the globe collectively spent thousands of hours manually curating and standardizing metadata for EVERY SINGLE GENOME! We hope that BTyperDB will help laboratories around the world with B. cereus group surveillance, source tracking, outbreak detection, and risk evaluation.

We’re incredibly grateful to ALL of our amazing collaborators, and we’re looking forward to 2024, when we’ll be improving both the front- and back-end of BTyperDB…and possibly add even more novel genomes 😉