The Virginia Bioinformatics Insitute (VBI) launched a free microbial database of microbial genome sequences, particularly of plant pathogens such as Phytophthora sojae and Phytophthora ramorum. The VBI Microbial Database (VMD) can be accessed at : http://phytophthora.vbi.vt.edu.

VMD is an integrated resource that includes community annotation features, toolkits, and resources to perform complex queries of biological information. The project's researchers created a browser, which makes it easy for users to view the genome sequence data and connect to detailed annotation pages for each sequence. The community annotation interface is available for registered members to add or edit annotations.

The database will later be expanded to inlcude DNA sequences from other pathogens such as Alternaria brassicicola and Hyaloperonospora parasitica. Proteomic and microaaray data will also be later added, which will be linked to the genomic data. (As of publishing, most of the links in the database are still under construction).

The database has been described recently in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, entitled "VMD: a community annotation database for oomycetes and microbial genomes," by Sucheta Tripathy, Varun N. Pandey, Bing Fang, Fidel Salas, and Brett M. Tyler.