In silico bioinformatic tools for determining core genes from sets of genomes

Abstract

The set of genes common to a group of organisms is known as the "core" set and the set of genes common to one or more of a group of organisms, but not to all of them is known as the "dispensable" set. Collectively, these two sets comprise the "pan-genome" of a set of organisms. While there are many software tools available for ortholog detection and clustering, there are far fewer tools to determine the core set of genes as well as the dispensable set. Continued development of these computational and data mining tools is essential to further our understanding of the pan-genomes of organisms and to make use of them. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.