Web resource of plant-associated bacteria and annotation services of their plant interaction factors and plant growth-promoting traits

Web service: https://plabase.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/pb/plabase.php

The identification and application of promising bacterial bio-inoculant strains in plant production systems is a sustainable and environment-friendly alternative to the conventional use of e.g., chemical fertilizers or herbicides. Until now the genetic characterization of respective strains that improve plant vigor and yield under even environmental harsh conditions was done manually due to the lack of a standardized annotation approach for plant growth-promoting traits (PGPTs) across all taxa.

The PLant-associated BActeria web resource (PLaBAse) aims to combine various services, such as databases, genomic annotation and prediction tools, to support characterization of plant-associated bacteria. State-of-the-art bioinformatics tools, like DIAMOND, BLAST and HMMER, enhance the identification of plant-associated bacteria (PIFAR-Pred) and the annotation of plant growth-promoting traits (PGPT-Pred) by analyzing entire bacterial genomic coding sequences (CDS) in amino acid format.

With PLaBAse, we hope to provide an easy-to-use approach to screen for know plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPBs) and their PGPT content, but also to annotate PGPTs of novel strains. In addition, it should facilitate the identification of best site-adapted bacterial bio-inoculants for plant growth-enhancement, phytosanitary and bio-safety strategies.

Publications: (preprint)
S. Patz, A. Gautam, M. Becker, S. Ruppel, P. Rodríguez-Palenzuela, DH. Huson. PLaBAse: A comprehensive web resource for analyzing the plant growth-promoting potential of plant-associated bacteria. bioRxiv 2021 https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.13.472471