The study of bacterial isolates or communities requires the analysis of the therein included plasmids
in order to provide an extensive characterization of
the organisms. Plasmids harboring resistance and
virulence factors are of especial interest as they
contribute to the dissemination of antibiotic resistance. As the number of newly sequenced bacterial
genomes is growing a comprehensive resource is
required which will allow to browse and filter the
available plasmids, and to perform sequence analyses. Here, we present PLSDB, a resource containing 13 789 plasmid records collected from the NCBI
nucleotide database. The web server provides an
interactive view of all obtained plasmids with additional meta information such as sequence characteristics, sample-related information and taxonomy.
Moreover, nucleotide sequence data can be uploaded
to search for short nucleotide sequences (e.g. specific genes) in the plasmids, to compare a given
plasmid to the records in the collection or to determine whether a sample contains one or multiple of the known plasmids (containment analysis).
The resource is freely accessible under https://ccbmicrobe.cs.uni-saarland.de/plsdb/