Systematic determination of the mosaic structure of bacterial genomes: species backbone versus strain-specific loops.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Public databases now contain multitude of complete bacterial genomes, including several genomes of the same species. The available data offers new opportunities to address questions about bacterial genome evolution, a task that requires reliable fine comparison data of closely related genomes. Recent analyses have shown, using pairwise whole genome alignments, that it is possible to segment bacterial genomes into a common conserved backbone and strain-specific sequences called loops.

Results

Here, we generalize this approach and propose a strategy that allows systematic and non-biased genome segmentation based on multiple genome alignments. Segmentation analyses, as applied to 13 different bacterial species, confirmed the feasibility of our approach to discern the

SUBMITTER: Chiapello H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1187871 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature