Elucidating the essentiality of essential genes in Escherichia coli K-12

• Main Authors: Jen-Yun Chang, 章人勻
• Other Authors: Hsuan-Cheng Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/83752455845187132541

碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 生物資訊研究所 === 94 === Recently, 303 essential gene candidates of Escherichia coli K-12 have been obtained from the construction of in-frame, single-gene knockout mutants by the collaboration of Dr. Hirotada Mori, NAIST, Japan. Elucidating the essentiality of these essential genes is a key to understand the system-level organization of living cells. To address this issue, the analysis of the essential genes from the perspectives of metabolic network and evolutionary conservation has been performed with comparison to the essential genes of Bacillus subtilis. The results show that the metabolic network follows power-law distribution and the essential genes tend to be irreplaceable nodes. The essential genes also show significantly higher conservation than non-essential genes across different bacteria species. This suggests that they are important in basic functions of bacteria living.