PhytoBacExplorer: A Phylogenomic Resource for the Phytobacterial Community

PhytoBacExplorer is a phylogenomic resource which allows the phytobacterial community to access curated, richly annotated, high-quality data for the intensively studied phytobacteria genera Xanthomonas and Pseudomonas and perform integrative analyses on that data . It includes tools for Multi-Locus Sequence Tag analyses, and phylogenetic reconstruction and visualisation, and its user-friendly GUI allows academic researchers to focus on the research and data exploration itself, rather than technical tasks. PhytoBacExplorer is build on the impactful and mature EnteroBase system with >4,200 users in the medical community, including a number of national reference laboratories. Here, we present an overview over PhytoBacExplorer’s key characteristics and features and illustrate its usefullness and strengths on an use case. In this use case, PhytoBacExplorer was utilized to retrieve the data, resolve the phylogeny and choose target and non-target assemblies for finding species- and pathovar-specific genetic markers for Xanthomonas.