BIGSdb Reviews

The BIGSdb tool is a wonderful platform for collaborative microbial population biology and genomic epidemiology projects. It extends the concepts that made the success of MLST to the genome-wide scale. Key to its design is the separation of genotypic and isolates databases, which enables at the same time the sharing of common nomenclatures across public health agencies or research laboratories, while allowing confidentiality of isolates metadata. Our experience of the software is excellent. It is highly reliable (no bug detected so far after more than one year of usage), user friendly (despite a serious learning curve), evolves fast to extended functionality, and the support is very fast and helpful. Microbiologists with no knowledge in bioinformatics can easily use it to extract relevant information from their own microbial isolates genomes. To my knowledge there is no open-source, freely distributed equivalent software so far.