The Life Identification Number (LIN) system is a genome similarity-based system to classify individual organisms based on reciprocal ANI. A LIN consists of a series of positions, where each position indicates an ANI threshold, from low to high, starting from the leftmost position. This initiative has produced two applications both of which are available publicly named LINflow and LINbase.
LINflow is a standalone LIN assignment workflow used to discover the genomic relatedness of bacteria. This python implementation of the LIN process is has already been released and is under development to be added as a package to the Bioconda package. The source of the project is public and can be accessed at the following link https://code.vt.edu/linbaseproject/LINflow .The details of this work was peer-reviewed and published and can be found at this link https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10906.
LINbase is the public service available at linbase.org. The service is a database designed for the purpose of accelerating and simplifying the description of Earth's microbial diversity at a precision that includes, but also goes beyond, named species. Users can circumscribe, describe, and name any group of bacteria (which we call LINgroups) at or below the genus level, even if the group consists of a single clonal lineage. This is simply done by selecting genomes of strains belonging to the taxon, adding a description, and providing a name. Validly published species names need to be linked to a peer-reviewed publication. Users can also upload genomes to place them precisely into the genome similarity framework together with all genomes already in LINbase to aid in precise strain identification and classification. LINbase can also be searched using short gene sequences to easily identify unknown strains even if their whole genome sequence is not available. The work was peer-reviewed and published and can be found at following link https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaa190.