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Aims: The Pathogen-Host Interactions Database (PHI-base) is a manually curated, multi-species knowledge base that captures experimentally-supported pathogenicity, virulence and effector phenotypes across plant, animal, human, insect and fungal hosts. Each record links a pathogen gene or allele to a host, assay type, phenotype outcome and evidence, underpinned by PHIPO and other OBO Foundry ontologies, enabling machine-readable, FAIR data integration with genomic and multi-omics resources. PHI-base version 5.2 (https://phi5.phi-base.org/) contains 33,498 curated pathogen-host interactions involving 303 pathogenic species and 237 hosts, and 10,300 genes curated from 5,222 peer-reviewed publications. These interactions involve fungal, bacterial and protist pathogens. PHI-base is used for comparative genomics/gene function transfer, resistance target discovery and functional genome annotation in agriculture and infectious disease research. To scale our curation to meet demand, we are developing AI-assisted workflows that combine large language models (LLMs) with AI curation tools.
Conclusions: Prototype tools support literature triage, extraction of pathogen and host entities, mapping to controlled vocabularies, and suggesting interaction types and phenotypes for biocurator review. For users, we are designing AI-enhanced interfaces for exploratory analysis, including context-aware searches of pathogen, host and phenotype terms, and interaction summaries for genes of interest. We integrate with external resources (UniProtKB, Ensembl, FungiDB) to display PHI-base knowledge within interactive genome browsers and analysis platforms. We will maintain biocurator-in-the-loop accuracy while increasing throughput, delivering knowledge to inform experiments and prioritise target genes for further analysis. Here, we will present current data content, usage patterns and initial AI workflows.