MYCOPLASMA-PNEUMONIAE AND MYCOPLASMA-GENITALIUM - A COMPARISON OF 2 CLOSELY-RELATED BACTERIAL SPECIES

The rapid progress in sequencing large quantities of DNA will provide an increasing number of complete genome sequences of closely related b acterial species as well as of pairs of isolates from the same species with different features, such as a pathogenic and an apathogenic repr esentative. This opens the way to apply subtractive comparative analys is as a tool to select from the large pool of all bacterial genes a re latively small set of genes that can be correlated with the expression of a certain phenotype. These selected genes can then be the target f or further functional analyses.