Publishing in Nucleic Acids Research, Eijlander and colleagues present a database that aims to provide an interactive guide to the sporulation cycle of Bacillus subtilis, from the vegetative state through to germination and outgrowth. The database, known as Sporeweb (http://sporeweb.molgenrug.nl), provides a bird's eye overview of each of the key developmental stages and their regulatory networks. For each stage, the key regulators and the genes that they control are linked to further information pages within the accompanying Sporeweb database or SubtiWiki (http://subtiwiki.uni-goettingen.de; the latest release of which was also recently described in Nucleic Acids Research). In addition, the relevant gene regulatory networks can be visualized using Cytoscape, and these visualizations can be individually tailored to include a specific subset of genes of interest.