P-197 - PHI-base 5: A new gene-centric web portal for the Pathogen-Host Interactions database to explore fungal virulence genes and 1st host targets

PHI-base is a multispecies gene to phenotype database that contains curated information from peer-reviewed research articles investigating host–pathogen interactions and 1^st host targets. PHI-base is freely accessible at www.phi-base.org and phi5.phi-base.org. PHI-base offers comprehensive information and FAIR data to wet biology researchers and computational biologists on pathogen and host genes and the phenotypic effects in host and in vitro when deleted or mutated in a given species.

Information on phenotypes, protein function, resistance to chemicals, 1^st host targets and other data types are extracted by biocurators and authors using our community curation tool, PHI-Canto (canto.phi-base.org), or added using a bulk data upload tool.

Our latest PHI-base 5 release (May 2025) provides information on ~275 pathogens, ~220 hosts covering >28,000 interactions, > 8,600 genes curated from > 4,700 articles. PHI-base 5 displays detailed phenotype data and ontologies such as GO and PHIPO in a gene-centric manner, i.e. all information on a pathogen or host gene are located on a single page for easy of comparison and use.

Here we describe the different functionalities of our new web portal and its integration with other databases such as Ensembl, FungiDB and UniProt. Use cases of PHI-base include shortening the research discovery process, annotation of RNAseq datasets and new genomes/pangenomes, generating graphical knowledge networks, and identifying new intervention control points.