This package serves as a toolkit and repository for the White-Kauffmann-Le Minor scheme for Salmonella serotyping, which is made available in multiple formats, along with methods for querying and comparing serovar names and antigenic formulae, as well as determining the most abundant serovar for a cluster of isolates.
SeroTools was developed by the United States Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
- Free software
- Documentation: https://serotools.readthedocs.io
- Source Code: https://github.com/CFSAN-Biostatistics/serotools
- PyPI Distribution: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/serotools
Salmonella bacteria are major foodborne pathogens estimated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cause 1.35 million infections annually in the United States [1]. Serological subtyping (serotyping) of Salmonella has historically been a critical component of characterization and successful outbreak identification and traceback efforts employed by public health researchers and regulatory agencies. The White-Kauffmann-Le Minor (WKL) Salmonella serotyping scheme specifies the commonly accepted naming and formatting conventions for Salmonella serotyping data and the antigenic factors (and other characteristics) which define each serovar. Salmonella serotyping data is routinely employed by a broad range of scientific researchers, physicians, public health professionals, food safety experts, etc.
SeroTools addresses multiple critical needs for the efficient analysis of Salmonella serotyping data. As technological advances continue to produce a range of high resolution subtyping options, including in silico serovar prediction based on whole genome sequencing, new tools are necessary for efficient method-comparison studies and quality control applied to increasingly large numbers of isolates. SeroTools serves as the only multiformat WKL repository accessible for software development and provides the only existing tools for querying the WKL scheme, comparing serovars for congruence, and predicting the most abundant serovar for clusters of isolates.
| [1] | The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. <https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/index.html>. |
- Query the White-Kauffmann-Le Minor Salmonella serotyping repository
- Compare serovar predictions for state of congruence
- Determine the most abundant serovar for a cluster of isolates
If you use SeroTools, please cite the following publication:
Baugher, J. D., (2020). SeroTools: a Python package for Salmonella serotype data analysis. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(53), 2556, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02556.
See the LICENSE file included in the SeroTools distribution.