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 fragmen ts 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 da tabase and be queried through a web server. Results: A database-driven software system (mlstdb) has been developed, whi ch is used by public health laboratories and researchers globally to query their nucleotide sequence data against centrally held databases over the in ternet. The mlstdb system consists of a set of perl scripts for defining th e database tables and generating the database management interface and dyna mic web pages for querying the database management interface and dynamic we b pages for querying the databases.