IPDB: the database of probiotic bifidobacterial
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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 bifidobacterial strains used in probiotic products and we performed comparative genome analyses focused on genetic traits possibly involved in intestinal colonization and host-microbe interaction.
Accordingly, 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 bifidobacterial probiotic strains.
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The IPDB encompasses genome sequences of 34 probiotic strains corresponding to three B. longum subsp. infantis, 11 B. longum subsp. longum, four B. bifidum, three B. breve, and 13 B. animalis subsp. lactis chromosomes. The collected genome sequences were retrieved from public repositories and were re-predicted and annotated using the most recent release of the MEGAnnotator pipeline. 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 of the bifidobacterial 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 34 bifidobacterial probiotics.
Table 4: Number of pili- and bacteriocin-encoding genes, and putative AMR genes for each bifidobacterial probiotic included in IPDB.

