- Article -
| In Silico Biology 2, 0008 (2002); ©2002, Bioinformation Systems e.V. |
Operon conservation from the point of view of Escherichia coli, and inference of functional inter-dependence of gene products from genome context
Gabriel Moreno-Hagelsieb* and Julio Collado-Vides
*Corresponding author
Laboratory of Computational Genomics, CIFN, UNAM, A.P. 565-A, Cuernavaca, Morelos 62100,
Mexico
E-mail: moreno@cifn.unam.mx
Edited by E. Wingender; received October 26, 2001; revised and accepted December 18, 2001; published January 28, 2002
Abstract
We have previously demonstrated that genes within experimentally characterized operons of Escherichia coli are conserved together in other genomes more frequently than genes at the borders of transcription units. Here we expand the analyses and show that, as the phylogenetic distance of the genomes compared increases, the genes remaining together must belong to genes associated into operons in other prokaryotes regardless of the operon organization of the corresponding orthologous gene pair of E. coli. At the same time, we show that the observed tendencies of genes within operons to keep very short inter-genic distances in E. coli, is the same in any other prokaryote whose genome is currently available. We also show the relationship between our analyses of conservation and the inference of functional relationships from genomic context.
Key words: genome context, functional relationship, operon conservation, intergenic distance