RIDOM: Comprehensive and public sequence database for identification of Mycobacterium species

Background Molecular identification of Mycobacterium species has two primary advantages when compared to phenotypic identification: rapid turn-around time and improved accuracy. The information content of the 5' end of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene (16S rDNA) is sufficient for identification of most bacterial species. However, reliable sequence-based identification is hampered by many faulty and some missing sequence entries in publicly accessible databases.