IPDB: the database of probiotic bacteria
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The World Health Organization defines probiotics as “live microorganisms, which when administered in adequate amounts confer a health benefit on the host”. 
Despite probiotic properties are often genus- or species-wide, strain-level differences in the genetic features conferring individual probiotic properties to commercialized bifidobacterial strains have not been investigated in detail. 
In this study, we built a genomic database named Integrated Probiotic DataBase (IPDB), consisting of common bacterial strains used in probiotic products.
We performed comparative genome analyses focused on genetic traits possibly involved in intestinal colonization and host-microbe interaction.
Our analyses revealed strain-level genetic differences, underlining the importance of inspecting strain-specific and outcome-specific efficacy of probiotics.
In this context, IPDB represents a valuable resource for obtaining genetic information of well-established probiotic strains.
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The IPDB encompasses genome sequences of 52 probiotic strains corresponding to the following species:

Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis
Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum
Bifidobacterium bifidum
Bifidobacterium breve
Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis
Lactobacillus acidophilus
Lacticaseibacillus casei
Lactobacillus gasseri
Lacticaseibacillus paracasei
Limosilactobacillus reuteri
Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus
Ligilactobacillus salivarius
Streptococcus thermophilus
Heyndrickxia coagulans (formerly Bacillus coagulans)

The collected genome sequences were retrieved from public repositories and were re-predicted and annotated using the most recent release of the MEGAnnotator2 pipeline (DOI:10.20517/mrr.2022.21).
Notably, the genomes are provided in two directories:

•	multifasta_nt: content includes the nucleotide sequences in FASTA format per genome.
•	gbk: content includes assembled genome sequences and associated annotation data (genbank format file) per genome.

Furthermore, strain-specific details and information concerning the comparative analysis results were provided in the Excel file named PBDB_info.xlsx containing:

•	Table 1: List and general info on the commercial probiotic strains used to build the IPDB.
•	Table 2: Pairwise ANI values of the bifidobacterial genomes included in the IPDB.
•	Table 3: Glycobiome profiles of the 52 bifidobacterial probiotics.
•	Table 4: Number of putative pili- bacteriocin- and EPS-encoding genes, as well as the putative vitamin and organic acid biosynthetic potential.

