MediaDive: the expert-curated cultivation media database

• Published in: Nucleic acids research Vol. 51; no. D1; pp. D1531 - D1538
• Main Authors: Koblitz, Julia, Halama, Philipp, Spring, Stefan, Thiel, Vera, Baschien, Christiane, Hahnke, Richard L, Pester, Michael, Overmann, Jörg, Reimer, Lorenz Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Oxford University Press 06.01.2023
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Culture Media - chemistry; Data Mining; Database Issue; Databases, Factual
• ISSN: 0305-1048; 1362-4962
• DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkac803

We present MediaDive (https://mediadive.dsmz.de), a comprehensive and expert-curated cultivation media database, which comprises recipes, instructions and molecular compositions of >3200 standardized cultivation media for >40 000 microbial strains from all domains of life. MediaDive is designed to enable broad range applications from every-day-use in research and diagnostic laboratories to knowledge-driven support of new media design and artificial intelligence-driven data mining. It offers a number of intuitive search functions and comparison tools, for example to identify media for related taxonomic groups and to integrate strain-specific modifications. Besides classical PDF archiving and printing, the state-of-the-art website allows paperless use of media recipes on mobile devices for convenient wet-lab use. In addition, data can be retrieved using a RESTful web service for large-scale data analyses. An internal editor interface ensures continuous extension and curation of media by cultivation experts from the Leibniz Institute DSMZ, which is interlinked with the growing microbial collections at DSMZ. External user engagement is covered by a dedicated media builder tool. The standardized and programmatically accessible data will foster new approaches for the design of cultivation media to target the vast majority of uncultured microorganisms.