Genome comparison of bacterial pathogens

Abstract

Bacterial pathogens are being sequenced at an increasing rate. To many microbiologists, it appears that there simply is not enough time to digest all the information suddenly available. In this chapter we present several tools for comparison of sequenced pathogenic genomes, and discuss differences between pathogens and non-pathogens. The presented tools allow comparison of large numbers of genomes in a hypothesis-driven manner. Visualization of the results is very important for clear presentation of the results and various ways of graphical representation are introduced.