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1 BioInformatics Institute, Matrix, 30 Biopolis Street, Singapore
2 Nanyang Centre for Supercomputing and Visualization, School of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
3 Human Genome Laboratory, Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Kent Ridge, Singapore 117597
Correspondence
Vincent T. K. Chow
micctk{at}nus.edu.sg
Overlapping genes have been proposed as a means of achieving genome reduction by compressing the maximum amount of information in limited sequence space. In this report, comparative analyses of the overlapping genes of genomes of nine bacteria with different lifestyles were performed. The results clearly suggest that overlapping genes may be a result of evolutionary pressure to minimize genome size. The genomes of two closely related obligatory intracellular parasites Rickettsia prowazekii and Rickettsia conorii were investigated further. Detailed analyses of these two genomes revealed that mutations at the ends of coding regions and elimination of intergenic DNA are the main forces that determine overlapping of genes.
The overlapping gene pairs of the rickettsial species have been classified into four categories. The gene identification number, the gene name, the direction of overlap and the number of overlapping nucleotides have been tabulated for each category and are available as supplementary material in IJSEM Online.
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