PhageDive: the new data resource on prokaryotic viruses

Prokaryotic viruses are the most diverse and abundant biological entities on Earth. While the amount of genomic data on viruses is currently growing exponentially, mainly due to the increasing application of metagenomics techniques, these data and those generated with different experimental approaches and molecular techniques often cannot be linked to the physical virus resource. As a result, the comprehensive set of existing data for a given bacteriophage is not accessible so far and different datasets are not linked for integrative analyses. This observation led us to develop PhageDive (phagedive.dsmz.de), a specific database for bacteriophages and archaeal viruses. This comprehensive database gathers all existing data on prokaryotic viruses that are dispersed across multiple sources, like scientific publications, specialized databases or internal files of culture collections. PhageDive allows to link own research data to the existing information through an easy and central access. PhageDive provides fields for various experimental data (lifestyle, lysis kinetics, adsorption kinetics, host range, genomic data, etc.) and all available metadata (e.g., geographical origin, isolation source). Data are standardized employing controlled vocabulary and ontologies. One important feature is to link experimental data to the culture collection number and the repository of the corresponding physical bioresource (virus and prokaryotic host strains). To date, PhageDive covers 1,167 phages from three different world-renowned collections (DSMZ, Canada's Laval collection and the UK's NCTC). An advanced search using all the sections has been created and an interoperable system has been set up with other resources such as NCBI, the Institut Pasteur's Viral host range database (VHRdb) or the DSMZ's BacDive and MediaDive.