GenoTrack, a Webtool to Geospatially Link Bacterial Genomes from Environmental and Clinical Settings

Abstract

Environment-related infections are a significant cause of mortality in developing countries and cause substantial morbidity in developed nations. This situation is exacerbated with the recent emergence of multi-and pan-drug resistant bacteria, where their spread and development are now a genuine health issue that is rapidly expanding worldwide. There is, therefore, a need for an integrated and curated database at a genomic level that will enable the tracking and identification of sources of resistant environmental to clinical infections for epidemiological containment. This paper presents GenoTrack - a genomic epidemiology web application that geospatially maps clinical bacterial genomes isolated from environmental and clinical settings focusing on their antibiotic resistance genes content. GenoTrack enables the geospatial mapping of genomes of selected bacteria using the cartographic display to yield a precise distribution of genomes in different settings. A phylogenomic tree showing the relatedness of analysed genomes and genome alignment features allows structural genomic element analysis. Here, we outline the development of GenoTrack and its implemented features, and we demonstrate its application to track genomes from different environments.