Database-driven multi locus sequence typing (MLST) of bacterial pathogens

Motivation: Multi Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) is a newly developed typing method for bacteria based on the sequence determination of internal fragments of seven house-keeping genes. It has proved useful in characterizing and monitoring disease-causing and antibiotic resistant lineages of bacteria. The strength of this approach is that unlike data obtained using most other typing methods, sequence data are unambiguous, can be held on a central database and be queried through a web server. Results: A database-driven software system (mlstdb) has been developed, which is used by public health laboratories and researchers globally to query their nucleotide sequence data against centrally held databases over the internet. The mlstdb system consists of a set of perl scripts for defining the database tables and generating the database management interface and dynamic web pages for querying the database management interface and dynamic web pages for querying the databases.