Prediction of operons in microbial genomes

Operon structure is an important organization feature of bacterial genomes. Many sets of genes occur in the same order on multiple genomes; these cons erved gene groupings represent candidate operons, This study describes a co mputational method: to estimate the likelihood that such conserved gene set s form operons. The method was used to-analyze 34 bacterial and archaeal ge nomes, and yielded more than 7600 pairs of genes that are highly likely (P greater than or equal to 0.98) to belong to the same operon. The sensitivit y of our method is 30-50% for the Escherichia coli genome. The predicted ge ne pairs are available from our World Wide Web site http:// www.tigr.org/ti gr-scripts/operons/operons.cgi.