Sakharkar Kishore R, Sakharkar Meena K, Verma Chandra, Chow Vincent T K
BioInformatics Institute, Matrix, 30 Biopolis Street, Singapore.
Nanyang Centre for Supercomputing and Visualization, School of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Int J Syst Evol Microbiol. 2005 May;55(Pt 3):1205-1209. doi: 10.1099/ijs.0.63446-0.
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.
重叠基因被认为是一种通过在有限的序列空间中压缩最大信息量来实现基因组缩减的方式。在本报告中，对九种具有不同生活方式的细菌基因组中的重叠基因进行了比较分析。结果清楚地表明，重叠基因可能是最小化基因组大小的进化压力的结果。对两种密切相关的 obligatory 细胞内寄生虫——普氏立克次体和康氏立克次体的基因组进行了进一步研究。对这两个基因组的详细分析表明，编码区末端的突变和基因间 DNA 的消除是决定基因重叠的主要因素。 （注：这里“obligatory”不太明确准确中文意思，可根据具体专业背景进一步调整）
