The VetBact database contains information about
bacteria that are of interest in
veterinary medicine. The database was developed at the
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the
National Veterinary Institute in Uppsala, Sweden.
VetBact is primarily intended as a tool for veterinary students and their teachers, but has also proved useful for veterinary practitioners and students attending other academic courses in bacteriology.
History
The first version of the database appeared in Swedish on the website of the National Veterinary Institute in 2006. The database received a major update and was re-launched as 'VetBakt 1.0' under its own domain name, vetbakt.se, in the following year. In 2010, a bilingual (English/Swedish) version known as 'VetBact 2.0' was released and the domain name was changed to vetbact.org. In 2011, three additional modules (VetBactBlog, VetBactQuiz and VetBactLab) were added to the VetBact website.
Contents of the database
This database contains information about over 200 species (and subspecies) of bacteria. These species belong to more than 80 genera and represent 9 of the 29 bacterial
phyla Phyla, the plural of ''phylum'', may refer to:
* Phylum, a biological taxon between Kingdom and Class
* by analogy, in linguistics, a large division of possibly related languages, or a major language family which is not subordinate to another
Phyl ...
. The information about each species comprises
etymology,
taxonomy, morphology, metabolism, biochemical reactions, host, disease,
phylogeny etc. There are more than 300 images for which non-commercial use is permitted under a
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
BY-NC-ND 2.5 license.
The modules VetBactBlog, VetBactQuiz and VetBactLab
These course-oriented modules can be found under the heading 'Course material' on VetBact.
* VetBactBlog is, as the name suggests, a blog. It offers an
RSS
RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...
feed and provides space for discussions.
* VetBactQuiz contains a number of questions for veterinary students. Automatic feed-back is given as soon as an answer has been submitted.
* VetBactLab is intended to complement, but not replace, experiments in the laboratory. The purpose of these experiments ''in silico'', or virtual experiments, is to teach students how to identify bacteria that cause various diseases in animals.
The VetBact database, and its modules, is based on Free and Open Source Software (
FOSS) and is now an integral part of the curriculum at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
References
External links
* {{official, http://www.vetbact.org
Veterinary medicine
Biological databases