As genomes of bacterial STD pathogens are sequenced, we anticipate conducting many comparative analyses. Such comparisons of bacterial genomes can be performed using the BLAST2 database comparison tool. The sequences of proteins encoded by genes of one genome are compared against the sequences of proteins encoded by genes in the other genome. The significance of any similarity is determined by the E-value, the probability that the similarity between two genes arose simply by chance. The lower the E-value, the greater chance that two proteins are orthologous, derived from a common ancestral protein and having the same function.

The first such examples of proteome comparisons are performed upon the C. trachomatis and C.pneumoniae proteomes (see also Kalman et al., Nature Genetics 21:385-389, 1999), and the M. genitalium and M. pneumoniae proteomes (see also Herrmann & Reiner, Curr Op in Microbio 1(5):572-579, 1998), which are presented below.

Chlamydia proteome comparisons.

Mycoplasma proteome comparisons.

Haemophilus proteome comparisons.

Chlamydia trachomatis vs. Treponema pallidum proteome comparisons.

Haemophilus ducreyi vs E.coli proteome comparisons.

Porphyromonas gingivalis vs Chlamydia proteome comparisons

Bugspray, the visualization tool utilized to produce the genome alignments, can be accessed for interactive use.

This analysis was prepared by Gary Xie, Charles Calef, Amy Leach and Staff. Please direct questions concerning this analysis to Gary Xie.