MIST: A microbial identification and source tracking system for next-generation sequencing data

The Professional Committee of Microbiology of the National Pharmacopoeia Commission organized the drafting of the Technical Guidelines for Microbial Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS), aiming to standardize the method process and technical indicators of microbial WGS and ensure the accuracy of sequencing and identification. On the basis of the Guidelines, we developed an integrated microbial identification and source tracking (MIST) system, which could meet the needs of microbial identification and contamination investigation in food and drug quality control. MIST integrates three analysis pipelines: 16S/18S/internal transcribed spacer amplicon-based microbial identification, WGS-based microbial identification, and single-nucleotide polymorphism-based microbial source tracking. MIST can analyze sequence data in a variety of formats, such as Fasta, base call file, and FASTQ. It can be connected to a high-throughput sequencing instrument to acquire sequencing data directly. We also developed a publicly accessible web server for MIST (http://syj.i-sanger.cn).