StrainInfo.net Web Services: Enabling Microbiologic Workflows Such as Phylogenetic Tree Building and Biomarker Comparison

In this paper we present novel web services offered by the StrainInfo.net bioportal. This portal integrates information in the domain of microbiology and offers a uniform web interface to a multitude of data providers. By providing web services, the integration results of StrainInfo.net become available for automated processing. Several classes of web services are implemented and some interesting uses are discussed in more detail. Combined with third-party services, the StrainInfo.net services can be integrated into workflows. We describe two example workflows: one basic workflow for the construction of a phylogenetic tree based on 16S rRNA gene sequences retrieved from the species of a given genus and a more advanced workflow to collect data of several biomarkers, to calculate the corresponding distance matrices, and to visualize the intra- and inter-species variation among the different biomarkers using the TaxonGap tool. Hereby, the tedious and manual work of collecting and analyzing data, and of visualizing the analysis results has become automated.