Software for paper on Multilocus sequence typing by blast from de novo assemblies against PubMLST

We provide a scalable command line tool, MLSTcheck, which can take multiple de novo assemblies and output detailed information about the sequence type of the samples. It provides access to 124 MLST databases covering all of the major human disease causing bacterial pathogens. MLSTcheck can search one or more databases at once, is parallelisable, fast and robust. When a sample contains more than one allele, it flags the contaminant since there should only be 1 copy of a house keeping gene in a well designed MLST scheme. A multiple FASTA alignment of the concatenated MLST genes is optionally produced, allowing for the creation of phylogenetic trees. This allows for rapid epidemiological outbreak investigations. Whilst other software applications can perform similar functions, this application follows more rigorous software engineering principles, including automated testing, continuous integration, object orientated code, and is installable via CPAN (a Perl package manager). In a large diverse set of 6814 publicly accessible draft assemblies, MLSTcheck was able to assign a sequence type in 99.6% of cases.