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Background
The first microbial genome sequence, Haemophilus influenzae, was published
in 1995. Since then, more than 400 microbial genome sequences
have been completed or commenced. This massive influx of data provides
the
opportunity to obtain biological insights through comparative genomics.
However few tools are available for this scale of comparative analysis.
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Results
The BLAST Score Ratio (BSR) approach, implemented in a Perl script,
classifies all putative peptides within three genomes using a measure
of similarity
based on the ratio of BLAST scores. The output of the BSR analysis
enables global visualization of the degree of proteome similarity
between all three
genomes. Additional output enables the genomic synteny (conserved gene
order) between each genome pair to be assessed. Furthermore, we extend
this synteny analysis by overlaying BSR data as a color dimension,
enabling visualization of the degree of similarity of the peptides
being compared.
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Conclusions:
Combining the degree of similarity, synteny and annotation will allow
rapid identification of conserved genomic regions as well as a number
of common
genomic rearrangements such as insertions, deletions and inversions.
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