Hallucination Check: Fictional Strain Names
Microbial information—like whether Pseudomonas putida degrades specific chemicals—is dispersed across many databases, research papers, and supplemental documents. There's no single comprehensive source, making it difficult and time-consuming to compile accurate annotations for microbial databases.
In practice, microbiologists gather strain-level details from a fragmented landscape: taxonomic registries (NCBI, LPSN), commercial culture collections (ATCC, DSMZ), hidden genome annotations, and thousands of scientific papers. With no centralized, consistently formatted repository, even routine checks—such as verifying antibiotic resistance or metabolic traits—require extensive manual cross-referencing.