CAMBer: an approach to support comparative analysis of multiple bacterial strains

BACKGROUND: There is a large amount of inconsistency in gene structure annotations of bacterial strains. This inconsistency is a frustrating impedance to effective comparative genomic analysis of bacterial strains in promising applications such as gaining insights into bacterial drug resistance. RESULTS: Here, we propose CAMBer as an approach to support comparative analysis of multiple bacterial strains. CAMBer produces what we called multigene families. Each multigene family reveals genes that are in one-to-one correspondence in the bacterial strains, thereby permitting their annotations to be integrated. We present results of our method applied to three human pathogens: Escherichia coli, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Staphylococcus aureus. CONCLUSIONS: As a result, more accurate and more comprehensive annotations of the bacterial strains can be produced.