Published paper: BacMet Database

It seems like our paper on the recently launched database on resistance genes against antibacterial biocides and metals (BacMet) has gone online as an advance access paper in Nucleic Acids Research today. Chandan Pal – the first author of the paper, and one of my close colleagues as well as my roommate at work – has made a tremendous job taking the database from a list of genes and references, to a full-fledged browsable and searchable database with a really nice interface. I have contributed along the process, and wrote the lion’s share of the code for the BacMet-Scan tool that can be downloaded along with the database files.

BacMet is a curated source of bacterial resistance genes against antibacterial biocides and metals. All gene entries included have at least one experimentally confirmed resistance gene with references in scientific literature. However, we have also made a homology-based prediction of genes that are likely to share the same resistance function (the BacMet predicted dataset). We believe that the BacMet database will make it possible to better understand co- and cross-resistance of biocides and metals to antibiotics within bacterial genomes and in complex microbial communities from different environments.

The database can be easily accessed here: http://bacmet.biomedicine.gu.se, and use of the database in scientific work can cite the following paper, which recently appeared in Nucleic Acids Research:

Pal C, Bengtsson-Palme J, Rensing C, Kristiansson E, Larsson DGJ: BacMet: Antibacterial Biocide and Metal Resistance Genes Database. Nucleic Acids Research. Database issue, advance access. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkt1252 [Paper link]