Gene-by-gene population annotation and analysis
Written by Keith Jolley, © 2010-2016 University of Oxford
Jolley & Maiden 2010, BMC Bioinformatics 11:595
BIGSdb is software designed to store and analyse sequence data for bacterial isolates. Any number of sequences can be linked to isolate records - these can be small contigs assembled from dideoxy sequencing through to whole genomes (complete or multiple contigs generated from parallel sequencing technologies such as 454 or Illumina).
BIGSdb extends the principle of MLST to genomic data, where large numbers of loci can be defined, with alleles assigned by reference to sequence definition databases (which can also be set up with BIGSdb). Loci can also be grouped into schemes so that types can be defined by combinations of allelic profiles, a concept analagous to MLST.
The latest version of the BIGSdb documentation can be found at http://bigsdb.readthedocs.io.