Operon Prediction in Bacterial Genomes

Operons are sets of adjacent genes that encode proteins with related metabolic functions. Operon prediction may be useful for understanding the systems of regulation and for genome annotation. In this work, we present an extension of the PROCSIMO tool to allow the operon prediction in bacterial genomes based on the similarity evaluation between pairs of genes. Computational experiments were made to validate this new functionality. With the use of this tool, we expect to enlarge the number of known operons in bacterial organisms.