Computing For Comparative Microbial Genomics

Overview and Goals This book describes how to visualize and compare bacterial genomes. Sequencing technologies are becoming so inexpensive that soon going for a cup of coffee will be more expensive than sequencing a bacterial genome. Thus, there is a very real and pressing need for high-throughput computational methods to compare hundreds and thousands of bacterial genomes. It is a long road from molecular biology to systems biology, and in a sense this text can be thought of as a path bridging these ? elds. The goal of this book is to p- vide a coherent set of tools and a methodological framework for starting with raw DNA sequences and producing fully annotated genome sequences, and then using these to build up and test models about groups of interacting organisms within an environment or ecological niche. Organization and Features The text is divided into four main parts: Introduction, Comparative Genomics, Transcriptomics and Proteomics, and ? nally Microbial Communities. The ? rst ? ve chapters are introductions of various sorts. Each of these chapters represents an introduction to a speci? c scienti? c ? eld, to bring all readers up to the same basic level before proceeding on to the methods of comparing genomes. First, a brief overview of molecular biology and of the concept of sequences as biological inf- mation are given.

Over 500 prokaryotic genomes have been sequenced to date, and thousands more have been planned for the next few years. While these genomic sequence data provide unprecedented opportunities for biologists to study the world of prokaryotes, they also raise extremely challenging issues such as how to decode the rich information encoded in these genomes. This comprehensive volume includes a collection of cohesively written chapters on prokaryotic genomes, their organization and evolution, the information they encode, and the computational approaches needed to derive such information. A comparative view of bacterial and archaeal genomes, and how information is encoded differently in them, is also presented. Combining theoretical discussions and computational techniques, the book serves as a valuable introductory textbook for graduate-level microbial genomics and informatics courses. Contents: General Characteristics of Prokaryotic Genomes (J Mrázek & A O Summers)Genes in Prokaryotic Genomes and Their Computational Prediction (R K Azad)Evolution of the Genetic Code: Computational Methods and Inferences (G Fournier)Dynamics of Prokaryotic Genome Evolution (P Lapierre)Mobile Genetic Elements and Their Prediction (M G I Langille et al.)Horizontal Gene Transfer: Its Detection and Role in Microbial Evolution (J P Gogarten & O Zhaxybayeva)Genome Reduction During Prokaryotic Evolution (F J Silva & A Latorre)Comparative Mechanisms for Transcription and Regulatory Signals in Archaea and Bacteria (A Martínez-Antonio & J Collado-Vides)Computational Techniques for Orthologous Gene Prediction in Prokaryotes (M Poptsova)Computational Elucidation of Operons and Uber-Operons (P Dam et al.)Prediction of Regulons Through Comparative Genome Analyses (Z-C Su et al.)Prediction of Biological Pathways Through Data Mining and Information Fusion (F-L Mao et al.)Microbial Pathway Models (S R Veflingstad et al.)Metagenomics (K Arima & J Wooley) Readership: Graduate students and microbiologists in microbial genomics and bioinformatics. Keywords:Bacteria;Archaea;Genomes;Genome Evolution;Orthologs;Genomic Structure;Operons;Regulons;Comparative Genomics;Microbial Pathways;Gene Duplication;Gene TransferKey Features:Tightly integrates theoretical discussions and computational approaches pertaining to prokaryotic genomesProvides, where appropriate, comparative studies of bacterial versus archaeal genomesIncludes contributions from leading researchers in the field, including Peter Gogarten, Anne Summers, Julio Collado Vides, Eberhard Volt, Ying Xu, and John Wooley

Sequence - Evolution - Function is an introduction to the computational approaches that play a critical role in the emerging new branch of biology known as functional genomics. The book provides the reader with an understanding of the principles and approaches of functional genomics and of the potential and limitations of computational and experimental approaches to genome analysis. Sequence - Evolution - Function should help bridge the "digital divide" between biologists and computer scientists, allowing biologists to better grasp the peculiarities of the emerging field of Genome Biology and to learn how to benefit from the enormous amount of sequence data available in the public databases. The book is non-technical with respect to the computer methods for genome analysis and discusses these methods from the user's viewpoint, without addressing mathematical and algorithmic details. Prior practical familiarity with the basic methods for sequence analysis is a major advantage, but a reader without such experience will be able to use the book as an introduction to these methods. This book is perfect for introductory level courses in computational methods for comparative and functional genomics.

This book provides an overview of computational analysis of genes and genomes, and of some most notable findings that come out of this work. Foundations of Comparative Genomics presents a historical perspective, beginning with early analysis of individual gene sequences, to present day comparison of gene repertoires encoded by completely sequenced genomes. The author discusses the underlying scientific principles of comparative genomics, argues that completion of many genome sequences started a new era in biology, and provides a personal view on several state-of-the-art issues, such as systems biology and whole-genome phylogenetic reconstructions. This book is an essential reference for researchers and students in computational biology, evolutionary biology, and genetics. Presents an historic overview of genome biology and its achievements Includes topics not covered in other books such as minimal and ancestral genomes Discusses the evolutionary resilience of protein-coding genes and frequent functional convergence at the molecular level Critically reviews horizontal gene transfer and other contentious issues Covers comparative virology as a somewhat overlooked foundation of modern genome science

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the RECOMB 2004 Satellite Workshop on Comparative Genomics, RCG 2004, held in Bertinoro, Italy in October 2004. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and improved for inclusion in the book. The papers address a broad variety of aspects of comparative genomics ranging from new quantitative discoveries about genome structures and processes to theorems on the complexity of computational problems inspired by genome comparison.

As genome-sequencing costs continue their downward spiral, sequencing of closely related organisms has become increasingly a?ordable. The growing amount of genomic data available demands for the constant development of computational tools to be applied in comparative genomics. The RECOMB Workshop on C- parative Genomics (RECOMB-CG) is devoted to bringing together scientists working on all aspects of comparative genomics, from computer scientists, ma- ematicians and statisticians working on novel computational approaches for genome analysis and comparison, to biologists applying these computational tools to study the structure and the evolution of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes. This volume contains the 19 papers presented at the 7th Annual RECOMB-CG workshop held during September 27–29, 2009 at the Renyi Institute, in Budapest, Hungary. The papers published in these proceedings were selected for oral p- sentation from 31 submissions from scientists around the world. Each paper was reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee in a stringent and thoughtful peer-review process.

Breakthroughs in high-throughput genome sequencing and high-performance computing technologies have empowered scientists to decode many genomes including our own. Now they have a bigger ambition: to fully understand the vast diversity of microbial communities within us and around us, and to exploit their potential for the improvement of our health and environment. In this new field called metagenomics, microbial genomes are sequenced directly from the habitats without lab cultivation. Computational metagenomics, however, faces both a data challenge that deals with tens of tera-bases of sequences and an algorithmic one that deals with the complexity of thousands of species and their interactions.This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for those who are interested in beginning their own journey in computational metagenomics. It is a prism to look through various intricate computational metagenomics problems and unravel their three distinctive aspects: metagenomics, data engineering, and algorithms. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates from genomics science or computer science fields will find that the concepts explained in this book can serve as stepping stones for more advanced topics, while metagenomics practitioners and researchers from similar disciplines may use it to broaden their knowledge or identify new research targets.