Comparative Analysis of Microbial Pathogen Genomes to Study Unique Gene Families
Jade Hotchkiss and Nicola J Mulder
from: Bioinformatics and Data Analysis in Microbiology (Edited by: Özlem Taştan Bishop). Caister Academic Press, U.K. (2014)
Abstract
Microbial pathogens are responsible for a significant proportion of mortality in humans. Although there is unlikely to be a single set of virulence genes common to all pathogens, comparative genomic analysis of pathogens and non-pathogens can shed light on which genes may be required for the pathogenic lifestyle and which genes are unique to a certain species or genus. Thousands of microbial genomes have been completely sequenced and annotated, providing the opportunity for multi-way comparisons. When comparing genomes of even closely related species, the genomes appear to be composed of a core set of genes common to a variety of organisms, a set of genes common to closely related organisms only, and finally a set of genes unique to a species or even to certain strains. In this chapter we review some of the methods for comparative analysis of microbial genomes and provide some results of genes unique to a species and genus using the Mycobacteria as an example read more ...
