PhagesDB

The Actinobacteriophage database, more commonly known as PhagesDB, is a website and database that gathers and shares information related to the discovery, characterization and genomics of viruses that typically infect Actinobacterial hosts. It is used to compare these phages and their genomic annotations, allowing the research community to post new findings for analysis. The database provides information on more than 8,000 bacteriophages, as well as over 1,600 fully sequenced phages.

Design and features
The creation of PhagesDB was carried out using Django, a server hosting environment. PhagesDB has individual entries for each different virus in the database, along with a separate GeneMark page, allowing a user to cross reference the position of genomes to ensure accuracy of data. PhagesDB can be used on its own but is found to be more accurate when used in collaboration with another bio-informatics website like NCBI Blast. The figure below indicates the different types and numbers of phages sequenced: The user can view information on groups of phages in a variety of ways. PhagesDB has amino-acid level details about its phage genomes that are sequenced by integration with Phamerator.

Access and rights to data
Information published in this database can be freely viewed by anyone, and an Application Programming Interface (API) is available. PhagesDB keeps some unpublished data that is not present in any medium, including newly performed genomic sequences.