Ochman Howard, Davalos Liliana M
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
Science. 2006 Mar 24;311(5768):1730-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1119966.
Though generally small and gene rich, bacterial genomes are constantly subjected to both mutational and population-level processes that operate to increase amounts of functionless DNA. As a result, the coding potential of bacterial genomes can be substantially lower than originally predicted. Whereas only a single pseudogene was included in the original annotation of the bacterium Escherichia coli, we estimate that this genome harbors hundreds of inactivated and otherwise functionless genes. Such regions will never yield a detectable phenotype, but their identification is vital to efforts to elucidate the biological role of all the proteins within the cell.
尽管细菌基因组通常较小且富含基因，但它们不断受到突变和群体水平过程的影响，这些过程会增加无功能DNA的数量。因此，细菌基因组的编码潜力可能大大低于最初的预测。在大肠杆菌的原始注释中仅包含一个假基因，而我们估计该基因组含有数百个失活的以及其他无功能的基因。这些区域永远不会产生可检测到的表型，但其识别对于阐明细胞内所有蛋白质的生物学作用至关重要。
