MOSAIC: an online database dedicated to the comparative genomics of bacterial strains at the intra-species level

Background: The recent availability of complete sequences for numerous closely related bacterial genomes opens up new challenges in comparative genomics. Several methods have been developed to align complete genomes at the nucleotide level but their use and the biological interpretation of results are not straightforward. It is therefore necessary to develop new resources to access, analyze, and visualize genome comparisons. Description: Here we present recent developments on MOSAIC, a generalist comparative bacterial genome database. This database provides the bacteriologist community with easy access to comparisons of complete bacterial genomes at the intra-species level. The strategy we developed for comparison allows us to define two types of regions in bacterial genomes: backbone segments (i.e., regions conserved in all compared strains) and variable segments (i.e., regions that are either specific to or variable in one of the aligned genomes). Definition of these segments at the...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Hélène Chiapello, Annie Gendrault, Christophe Caron, Jérome Blum, Marie-Agnès Petit, Meriem El Karoui
• Keywords: Bacterial Genomes, BMCBI 2008, Genomes, Related Bacterial Genomes