Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Early classification of prokaryotes was based solely on phenotypic similarities, but modern prokaryote characterization has been strongly influenced by advances in genetic methods. With the fast development of the sequencing technology, the ever increasing number of genomic sequences per species offers the possibility for developing distance determinations based on whole-genome information. The average nucleotide identity (ANI), calculated from pair-wise comparisons of all sequences shared between two given strains, has been proposed as the new metrics for bacterial species definition and classification. In this study, we developed the web version of ANItools (http://ani.mypathogen.cn/), which helps users directly get ANI values from online sources. A database covering ANI values of any two strains in a genus was also included (2773 strains, 1487 species and 668 genera). Importantly, ANItools web can automatically run genome comparison between the input genomic sequence and data sequences (Genus and Species levels), and generate a graphical report for ANI calculation results. ANItools web is useful for defining the relationship between bacterial strains, further contributing to the classification and identification of bacterial species using genome data.Database URL: http://ani.mypathogen.cn/. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

We compared pairs of 1,226 bacterial strains with whole genome sequences and calculated their average nucleotide identity (ANI) between genomes to determine whether whole genome comparison can be directly used for bacterial species definition. We found that genome comparisons of two bacterial strains from the same species (SGC) have a significantly higher ANI than those of two strains from different species (DGC), and that the ANI between the query and the reference genomes can be used to determine whether two genomes come from the same species. Bacterial species definition based on ANI with a cut-off value of 0.92 matched well (81.5%) with the current bacterial species definition. The ANI value was shown to be consistent with the standard for traditional bacterial species definition, and it could be used in bacterial taxonomy for species definition. A new bioinformatics program (ANItools) was also provided in this study for users to obtain the ANI value of any two bacterial genome pairs (http://genome.bioinfo-icdc.org/). This program can match a query strain to all bacterial genomes, and identify the highest ANI value of the strain at the species, genus and family levels respectively, providing valuable insights for species definition.