Toward better public genomic resources: two standardized datasets for L. monocytogenes and V. parahaemolyticus

Listeria monocytogenes is responsible for listeriosis, a serious disease affecting both humans and animals. Vibrio parahaemolyticus, found in various aqueous environments including marine, coastal, and freshwater, is associated with seafood-related illnesses. These food-borne pathogens have been frequently involved in disease outbreaks worldwide. While the NCBI Pathogen Detection database contains tens of thousands of sequences for these bacteria, challenges such as inconsistent quality, redundancy and non-standardized metadata limit their reuse. We present here two curated genomic datasets of 37,993 L. monocytogenes and 7,963 V. parahaemolyticus selected through rigorous quality control, deduplication, and annotation with harmonized contextual metadata, including standardized descriptors of isolation source, location, and isolation date. These datasets cover many diverse sources (animal, human, food, and environment) over a large time-period, and encompass multiple geographical regions. These datasets adhere to FAIR principles and can be used by the scientific community, within a “One Health” context, to improve our understanding of their ecology, to facilitate the epidemiological surveillance, and to identify genetic traits related to source attribution.