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EDITORIAL article

Front. Genet.
Sec. Evolutionary and Population Genetics
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fgene.2024.1490645
This article is part of the Research Topic Microbial Comparative Genomics and Pangenomics: New Tools, Approaches And Insights Into Gene and Genome Evolution View all 17 articles

Editorial: Microbial Comparative Genomics and Pangenomics: New Tools, Approaches, and Insights into Gene and Genome Evolution

Provisionally accepted
Digvijay Verma Digvijay Verma 1*Satyanarayana Tulasi Satyanarayana Tulasi 2*Paulo J. Dias Paulo J. Dias 3*
  • 1 Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India
  • 2 Netaji Subhas University of Technology, Delhi, National Capital Territory of Delhi, India
  • 3 University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The emergence of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies was the game changer during the first decade of the 21 st century that led to the development of a new sub-field of Genomics i.e., Pangenomics. The initial concept of Pangenome fulfilled the demand for minimum inclusion of the required number of genomes to achieve good confidence by covering the entire genes of a species (Tettelin et al., 2005). The entire spectrum of genes, gene order, gene content, and their structural variations could be explored to assess the species' phylogenetic relatedness. This gene-oriented branch of genomics categorizes genes into three groups based on their relatedness among various strains of a species. This includes core (shared among 99% of the strains), shell (10-99%), and, cloud (<10% of the strains) genes. The core genes are evolutionarily conserved, while shell and cloud genes constitute This study also confirmed a high genomic diversity present in this human pathogen in this country and showed the prevalence of mixed infections in Ningbo was higher than the ones reported in other regions of China.Looking ahead, the awesome ability of Artificial Intelligence in the recognition of patterns, and the anticipated dissemination of these methodologies to all areas of scientific knowledge combined with the advent of the first commercial generation of quantum computers at the turn of the decade and the corresponding leap in the computational power available to biologists anticipate a new major leap in Comparative Genomics and Pangenomics. The development of new methodologies combining these technological revolutions suggests that soon biologists will be able to directly simulate the phenotype of microbial strains and species from the observed genotypes, leading to the evolution of the current descriptive nature of Comparative Genomics and Pangenomics towards a new one more predictive. The future thus looks bright.

    Keywords: Pangenomics, Microbial Genomics, next generation sequencing, whole genome sequencing, Metagenome

    Received: 03 Sep 2024; Accepted: 10 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Verma, Tulasi and Dias. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Digvijay Verma, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India
    Satyanarayana Tulasi, Netaji Subhas University of Technology, Delhi, 110078, National Capital Territory of Delhi, India
    Paulo J. Dias, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, 1649-004, Lisboa, Portugal

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