Every pathogen. One standard.
No barriers.
ARGUS is not a database. It is a commitment: that open genomic surveillance should be free, citable, reproducible, and available to every researcher in every setting.
Why ARGUS?
As antimicrobial resistance threatens to undo a century of medical progress, the organisms that drive the crisis are the seven WHO priority ESKAPE pathogens. Each has its own epidemiology, its own resistance mechanisms, and its own species-specific typing schemes. A single generic bacterial database cannot express the queries that clinical and public-health users actually need to run.
ARGUS is not a single database. It is a family of seven independent, species-specific platforms — each built around the same architecture, each with its own DOI, its own release cycle, and its own community of users.
In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was the hundred-eyed giant who never slept. His eyes were scattered across his whole body, ensuring he could watch everything at once, all the time. Genomic surveillance must adopt the same vigilance — but with far more agility than traditional databases allow.
The name also encodes the architecture: many independent, species-specific views (the eyes), all coordinated under one umbrella (the giant). Seven pathogens, one family.
The architecture we share
Every ARGUS platform follows the same five design principles:
Accession-first retrieval
The plain-text accession list is the centre of the interface — not an afterthought. Every filter resolves to one deliverable: a clean list of NCBI IDs ready for downstream analysis.
Metadata-integrated
Country, isolation source, host species, and collection year are columns and filters on every typing page — not a separate join you have to perform.
Serverless by design
Static HTML, embedded JSON, GitHub Pages hosting. No backend to break, no API rate limits, no server to go offline when the grant ends.
Zero barrier to entry
No installation, no login, no API key, no local storage. Every platform runs entirely in a modern browser over HTTPS.
Versioned, citable, reproducible
Every major release is frozen, minted with a Zenodo DOI, and citable forever. Benchmark against a specific version — not a moving target.
How we version
Traditional databases update continuously, silently, and untraceably. A query that worked last month returns different results today. Benchmarking is impossible. Reproducibility is lost.
ARGUS platforms follow a strict release cycle:
v0.x — Live pilots
Initial deployment of the highest-quality subset (typically RefSeq GCF genomes). Interactive typing, gene retrieval, and metadata filtering are fully functional. The platform is live and citable as a preprint release.
v1.0.0 — The definitive release
Complete annotation of the full public repository, including all GenBank GCA genomes. Frozen, versioned, and minted with a permanent Zenodo DOI for strict reproducibility in benchmarking and clinical tracking. Every accession a user has exported from v0.x remains valid — the versioning is strictly additive.
v2.0.0, v3.0.0, … — Major expansion milestones
As the global public repository grows by 100,000+ assemblies, subsequent major versions are published as distinct, citable snapshots — mirroring the versioning paradigms of ResFinder and CARD.
Family roadmap
The current state and next milestone for every platform in the ARGUS family.
Funding & sustainability
💰 How ARGUS is funded
ARGUS and every platform it hosts are built without dedicated grant funding. This work received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Sustainability is structural rather than financial. Because every platform is a static site served from GitHub Pages, there are no recurring server costs, no database infrastructure, and no active backend to maintain. The entire family runs on free-tier infrastructure and MIT-licensed code, and is designed to remain online indefinitely — even if external funding never materialises.
If ARGUS supports your research, the most effective way to sustain it is to use it, cite it, and report issues. Long-term usage is the only metric that matters for a resource like this.