"Who is who?" A central database for resolving microbial strain identifiers

Poster presented at GCB 2022.

"Who is who?" A central database for resolving microbial strain identifiers

Strain identifiers represent a universal language for scientists, clinicians, industry, legal
compliance, and regulatory controls to communicate their findings, control, compare
and analyze data. The most widely used strain identifiers for microorganisms are
culture collection numbers like DSM 5522 or ATCC 43876, which are assigned by
culture collections during deposition.
The advantage of using culture collections as strain identifiers is that they are unique,
stable and reliable, as collections apply high quality standards. The disadvantage is
that during distribution of a strain between collections, multiple culture collection
numbers are assigned to different cultures of the same strain.
Here we present a prototype database for collecting and curating culture collection
numbers as well as their relations and providing them through a web API and UI.
The developed web interface enables scientists to easily find equivalent strains based
on their culture collection numbers and offers information about associated data such
as sequence accession numbers. While the web API can directly be integrated into
workflows or other databases for automatic strain identity resolution.
Ultimately, these unique identifiers will allow the retracing of the relations between
different cultures and thus depict a sharing history for each strain.
The long-term goal is to establish persistent identifiers for each microbial strain.