Operon prediction in cyanobacteria using comparative genomics

In this work, we performed a comprehensive analysis of the genome organization of eight publicly available cyanobacterial genomes and of the extensively studied Escherichia coli K12. Our comparison revealed striking similarities in organization of different microbial genomes. We examined the orientation of putative CDS, and distance distribution patterns between adjacent putative CDS in the whole genome as well as between genes within operons and across operon borders. Our results enabled us to calculate distance log-likeihoods for gene pairs to be part of the same operon and to apply this metric to predict operons in two newly sequenced cyanobacterial genomes, Synechococcus OS-A and OS-B'.