Summary
PLaBAse is a curated web resource and computational platform designed to enable systematic identification and comparison of plant growth-promoting traits in bacterial genomes. The resource integrates a database of plant-associated bacteria with predictive tools based on a literature- and omics-informed ontology of growth-promotion-associated traits. Comparative analysis across diverse bacterial strains reveals that plant-symbiotic bacteria are characterised by larger genomes and enrichment in genes annotated with plant growth-promotion functions, though some traits are also found in non-plant-associated bacteria, suggesting cross-environment transmission or environmental adaptation.
UK applicability
This computational resource is globally applicable and could support UK researchers and agricultural practitioners seeking to identify and evaluate beneficial bacterial strains for sustainable crop production and disease management. The findings may inform UK bioinoculant development and strain selection strategies, though validation in UK-specific soil and climatic contexts would be necessary.
Key measures
Number of plant-associated bacterial strains in database (5,565); size of PGPT ontology (~6,900 traits); protein sequence annotations (6,965,955); comparative genome size and PGPT gene counts across 70,540 strains from seven environments; distribution of PGPTs across plant organs and bacteria-induced plant phenotypes
Outcomes reported
The study developed PLaBAse, a web resource comprising a database of 5,565 plant-associated bacteria, a predictive tool for plant growth-promoting traits (PGPT-Pred) based on an ontology of ~6,900 traits linked to nearly 7 million protein sequences, and analysis of trait distribution across 70,540 bacterial strains from seven environments and multiple plant organs. The analysis identified that plant-symbiotic bacteria generally have larger genomes and higher counts of genes annotated with plant growth-promoting traits compared to bacteria from non-plant environments.
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