BacFITBase

BacFITBase catalogs bacterial gene contributions to in vivo fitness across multiple pathogens and vertebrate hosts to support identification of novel antibiotic targets.

Key Features:

• Database scope: Contains over 90,000 entries describing the role of individual genes in enhancing bacterial fitness under in vivo infection conditions.
• Experimental basis: Entries were compiled from 15 distinct studies employing transposon mutagenesis.
• Pathogen coverage: Includes Acinetobacter baumannii, Campylobacter jejuni, Escherichia coli strains (such as CFT073, M12, O157:H7 str. EDL933), Haemophilus influenzae, Klebsiella pneumoniae subsp. pneumoniae, Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis, Porphyromonas gingivalis, Salmonella enterica serovars Typhimurium (SL1344 and ST4 74), Serratia marcescens, Streptococcus pyogenes, Vibrio cholerae, and Vibrio parahaemolyticus.
• Host and tissue coverage: Data encompass multiple vertebrate hosts including cow (Bos taurus), chicken (Gallus gallus), mouse (Mus musculus), rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), and pig (Sus scrofa), spanning 10 different tissues.
• Gene-level annotations: Provides annotations of genes and their contributions to bacterial fitness during host infection.
• Curation: Manually curated dataset assembled by Tartaglia Lab.
• Antibiotic target prioritization: Highlights genes essential for infection to support discovery and prioritization of novel antibiotic targets.

Scientific Applications:

• Antibiotic target discovery: Prioritizes genes essential for infection as candidate targets for therapeutic development.
• Pathogenesis research: Enables identification of bacterial determinants required for survival and virulence in vivo.
• Host-pathogen interaction studies: Supports comparison of gene fitness across hosts and tissues to reveal host-specific requirements.
• Cross-study comparative analyses: Facilitates comparative analysis of transposon mutagenesis results across multiple pathogens and experiments.
• Experimental candidate selection: Informs selection of genes for follow-up experimental validation in infection models.

Methodology:

Entries were compiled and manually curated from 15 studies that employed transposon mutagenesis to assess gene contributions to bacterial fitness in in vivo infection conditions.