Persistence drives gene clustering in bacterial genomes

Lien vers Pubmed [PMID] – 18179692

BMC Genomics 2008;9:4

Gene clustering plays an important role in the organization of the bacterial chromosome and several mechanisms have been proposed to explain its extent. However, the controversies raised about the validity of each of these mechanisms remind us that the cause of this gene organization remains an open question. Models proposed to explain clustering did not take into account the function of the gene products nor the likely presence or absence of a given gene in a genome. However, genomes harbor two very different categories of genes: those genes present in a majority of organisms – persistent genes – and those present in very few organisms – rare genes.