The Value of Complete Microbial Genome Sequencing (You Get What You Pay For)

Since the publication of the complete Haemophilus influenzae genome sequence in July 1995 (4), the field of microbiology has been one of the largest beneficiaries of the breakthroughs in genomics and computational biology that made this accomplishment possible. When the 1.8-Mbp H. influenzae project began in 1994, it was not certain that the whole-genome shotgun sequencing strategy would succeed because it had never been attempted on any piece of DNA larger than an average lambda clone (∼40 kbp) (9).

[1]  Mihai Pop,et al.  Comparative Genome Sequencing for Discovery of Novel Polymorphisms in Bacillus anthracis , 2002, Science.

[2]  S. Salzberg,et al.  Complete Genome Sequence of a Virulent Isolate of Streptococcus pneumoniae , 2001, Science.

[3]  J. Musser.  Single nucleotide polymorphisms in Mycobacterium tuberculosis structural genes. , 2001, Emerging infectious diseases.

[4]  S. Salzberg,et al.  Evidence for symmetric chromosomal inversions around the replication origin in bacteria , 2000, Genome Biology.

[5]  S. Salzberg,et al.  DNA sequence of both chromosomes of the cholera pathogen Vibrio cholerae , 2000, Nature.

[6]  R. Overbeek,et al.  Functional analysis of gapped microbial genomes: amino acid metabolism of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans. , 2000, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[7]  O. White,et al.  A bacterial genome in flux: the twelve linear and nine circular extrachromosomal DNAs in an infectious isolate of the Lyme disease spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi , 2000, Molecular microbiology.

[8]  S. Salzberg,et al.  Genome sequence of the radioresistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans R1. , 1999, Science.

[9]  S. Salzberg,et al.  Evidence for lateral gene transfer between Archaea and Bacteria from genome sequence of Thermotoga maritima , 1999, Nature.

[10]  S. Salzberg,et al.  Genomic sequence of a Lyme disease spirochaete, Borrelia burgdorferi , 1997, Nature.

[11]  R. Fleischmann,et al.  Whole-genome random sequencing and assembly of Haemophilus influenzae Rd. , 1995, Science.

[12]  F. Sanger,et al.  Nucleotide sequence of bacteriophage lambda DNA. , 1982, Journal of molecular biology.