An increasing prevalence of hospital acquired infections and foodborne illnesses caused by pathogenic and multidrug resistant bacteria has stimulated a pressing need for benchtop computational methods to rapidly and accurately classify bacteria from genomic sequence data, and based on that, to trace the source of infection.

BacWGSTdb aims to provide a one-stop solution to epidemiological outbreak analysis and pioneer the movement of whole genome sequencing (WGS) from proof-of-concept studies to routine use in the clinical microbiology laboratory. Bench scientists can also use this database as a convenient tool for phylogenetic analysis of bacterial genomes.