BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

Digital.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC

oai:digital.csic.es:10261/305723

Bacterial genomes are massively sequenced, and they provide valuable data to better know the complete set of genes of a species. The analysis of thousands of bacterial strains can identify both shared genes and those appearing only in the pathogenic ones. Current computational gene finders facilitate this task but often miss some existing genes. However, the present availability of different genomes from the same species is useful to estimate the selective pressure applied on genes of complete pangenomes. It may assist in evaluating gene predictions either by checking the certainty of a new gene or annotating it as a gene under positive selection. Here, we estimated the selective pressure of 19 271 genes that are part of the pangenome of the human opportunistic pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii and found that most genes in this bacterium are subject to negative selection. However, 23% of them showed values compatible with positive selection. These latter were mainly uncharacterized proteins or genes required to evade the host defence system including genes related to resistance and virulence whose changes may be favoured to acquire new functions. Finally, we evaluated the utility of measuring selection pressure in the detection of sequencing errors and the validation of gene prediction., This research was supported by the Ministries of Economy and Competitiveness, and Science and Innovation of the Spanish Government with grants BFU2016-77297-P and PID2020-114861GB-I00, and by the European Regional Development Fund and the Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades de la Junta de Andalucía with grant PY20_00871.