Development of a method for core genome identification as a basis for microbial comparative genomics

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As a fundamental basis for comparative analysis of microbial genomes that have undergone complex evolutionary processes including horizontal gene transfers, we have investigated a method to identify a "genomic core structure" among related genomes that is mainly inherited through vertical transfers. Our method is based on extracting the regions that have conserved gene order among the related genomes. We applied our method to various genomic data to test its validity and established a system to accumulate the resulting core structures of the published data into a database. We also developed a tool that implements the protocol for core genome analysis including visualization of core structures, and applied it to actual comparative studies of closely related microbial genomes.