Computational comparative genomics of eu‐ and prokaryotes

With the rapid advent of worldwide genome projects, scientists are confronted with a tremen- dous increase in the amount of novel information. However, the gap between data collection and inter- pretation is also growing. For this reason, genome databases contain a wealth of information which is accessible, but which may remain obscured. Much can be learned from comparing different genomes, as genomes of distant organisms may still encode proteins with high sequence similarity. The order of genes (colinearity) in genomes may also be conserved to some extent. We have employed both these observations to create a multi-functional, computational analysis system (genomeSCOUT 2 ), which allows for rapid identification and functional