Comparative genomic analyses of seventeen Streptococcus pneumoniae strains: insights into the pneumococcal supragenome.

ABSTRACT: The distributed-genome hypothesis (DGH) states that pathogenic bacteria possess a supragenome that is much larger than the genome of any single bacterium and that these pathogens utilize genetic recombination and a large, noncore set of genes as a means of diversity generation. We sequenced the genomes of eight nasopharyngeal strains of Streptococcus pneumoniae isolated from pediatric patients with upper respiratory symptoms and performed quantitative genomic analyses among these and nine publicly available pneumococcal strains. Coding sequences from all strains were grouped into 3,170 orthologous gene clusters, of which 1,454 (46%) were conserved among all 17 strains. The majority of the gene clusters, 1,716 (54%), were not found in all strains. Genic differences per strain pair ranged fr

SUBMITTER: Hiller NL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2168654 | biostudies-literature | 2007 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature