Consistency of gene starts among Burkholderia genomes

BACKGROUND: Evolutionary divergence in the position of the translational start site among orthologous genes can have significant functional impacts. Divergence can alter the translation rate, degradation rate, subcellular location, and function of the encoded proteins. RESULTS: Existing Genbank gene maps for Burkholderia genomes suggest that extensive divergence has occurred--53% of ortholog sets based on Genbank gene maps had inconsistent gene start sites. However, most of these inconsistencies appear to be gene-calling errors. Evolutionary divergence was the most plausible explanation for only 17% of the ortholog sets. Correcting probable errors in the Genbank gene maps decreased the percentage of ortholog sets with inconsistent starts by 68%, increased the percentage of ortholog sets with extractable upstream intergenic regions by 32%, increased the sequence similarity of intergenic regions and predicted proteins, and increased the number of proteins with identifiable signal peptides. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight an emerging problem in comparative genomics: single-digit percent errors in gene predictions can lead to double-digit percentages of inconsistent ortholog sets. The work demonstrates a simple approach to evaluate and improve the quality of gene maps.