International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) phenotypic database

The International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) is the official publication of the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes and the Bacteriology and Applied Microbiology Division of the International Union of Microbiological Societies, and the official journal of record for novel bacterial and archaeal taxa (http://ijs.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/ijsem). We manually searched IJSEM articles to extract phenotypic, metabolic and environmental tolerance data of bacterial strains from 2004 to 2014. We focused on the most recent entries as they presumably used standardized and state-of-the-art methods, up-to-date taxonomic nomenclature, most strains had easily retrievable 16S rRNA gene sequence data, and many strains also had publicly available genome sequence data available. Data was manually collected using Google Forms as variable structure of the articles and inconsistent reporting of relevant information precluded the use of automatic text parsing algorithms.