Many of the projects that I’ve been working on recently have led me to ask questions like, ”what bacteria encode this group of genes?” and “what genes are shared across this group of bacteria?” Even for a single species, the patterns of genes across genomes can be complex and beautiful!
Update: All of the maps shown below can now be viewed interactively here.
To make it easier to generate interactive displays to explore these patterns (which I call “genes-in-genomes maps”), I ended up building out a collection of tools which I would love for any researcher to use.
To explain a bit more about this topic, I recorded a short talk based on a presentation I gave at a local microbiome interest group.
In the presentation I walk through a handful of these pan-genome maps, which you can also download and explore for yourself using the links below.
I’m excited to think that this way of displaying microbial pan-genomes might be useful to researchers who are interested in exploring the diversity of the microbial world. If you’d like to talk more about using this approach in your research, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.