The Pseudomonas aeruginosa Pan-Genome Provides New Insights on Its Population Structure, Horizontal Gene Transfer, and Pathogenicity.

ABSTRACT: The huge increase in the availability of bacterial genomes led us to a point in which we can investigate and query pan-genomes, for example, the full set of genes of a given bacterial species or clade. Here, we used a data set of 1,311 high-quality genomes from the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, 619 of which were newly sequenced, to show that a pan-genomic approach can greatly refine the population structure of bacterial species, provide new insights to define species boundaries, and generate hypotheses on the evolution of pathogenicity. The 665-gene P. aeruginosa core genome presented here, which constitutes only 1% of the entire pan-genome, is the first to be in the same order of magnitude as the minimal bacterial genome and represents a conservative estimate of the actual core g

SUBMITTER: Freschi L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6328365 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature