The Flankophile pipeline enables the analysis and visualization of flanking regions of prokaryotic sequences of interest on large data sets in one step and in a consistent manner. A specific tool for flanking region analysis with automated visualization has not been developed before, and Flankophile will make flanking region analysis easier and accessible to more people. Flankophile will be especially useful in the field of genomic epidemiology of acquired antimicrobial resistance genes. Here, information from flanking region sequences can be instrumental in rejecting or supporting the possibility of a recent common source of the same resistance gene found in different samples.
Keywords: antibiotics resistance; bioinformatics; epidemiology; genomics; metagenomics; phylogenetic analysis; sequence analysis; software; veterinary microbiology.