Help & Tutorial

Getting Started

AquaVir-KB is a comprehensive knowledge base for viruses infecting aquatic invertebrates. You can search, browse, and download data without any registration.

1. Search: Type a virus name (e.g. "White spot syndrome virus"), host (e.g. "Penaeus"), accession (e.g. "NC_003225"), or family (e.g. "Nimaviridae") in the search bar.
2. Browse: Use the Viruses, Hosts, or Taxonomy links to explore the database by category.
3. Filter: On the search page, use the filters (phylum, family, genome completeness, country) to narrow results.
4. Download: Bulk download FASTA sequences, metadata tables, and evidence records from the Download page - all under CC BY 4.0.

API Access

AquaVir-KB provides a REST API for programmatic access. Full documentation is available at /docs (Swagger UI).

Quick examples:

# Search for viruses
curl "https://aquavirdb.com/api/search?q=white+spot&page=1&page_size=10"

# Get virus detail
curl "https://aquavirdb.com/api/virus/NC_003225"

# Get statistics
curl "https://aquavirdb.com/api/stats"

# Download all sequences
wget "https://aquavirdb.com/api/download/all_sequences.fasta"
      

Key Features

• BLAST Search: Run BLASTP/BLASTX against RdRp proteins - RdRp BLAST
• Phylogeny: Interactive phylogenetic trees for virus families - Phylogeny
• Geographic Map: Visualize virus distribution by country - Map
• Host-Virus Network: Interactive bipartite network of host-virus associations - Network
• Statistics: Comprehensive database statistics and charts - Statistics

Data Scope & Curation

The analysis set presented throughout the site is the confirmed, manually curated subset: 5,403 isolates, every one of them curation_status='manual_checked'. It is the only isolate set the site lists, counts, or plots.

• Raw database totals (e.g. 17,867 isolate records) are reference-only figures. They include historical and superseded records and are not part of the analysis set.
• Metagenomic candidates (8,008) are environmental sequence candidates. They are unverified evidence of viral presence and are deliberately kept outside the analysis set.
• Unbound isolates (WSSV). On 2026-09-29, 107 isolate records that had been attributed to white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) were unbound from that attribution and renamed. They are withheld from the public data exports by an export-time gate (isolate_publish_deny). Withholding them is a provenance decision only: their taxonomy has not been re-verified, so they should not be treated as confirmed records either. They are also absent from the analysis set shown here.

Data Formats

Citing AquaVir-KB

If you use AquaVir-KB in your research, please cite our paper and the database URL. See the About page for complete citation information and the Download page for the CITATION.cff file.