Bacterial Pangenome: A Review on the Current Strategies, Tools and Applications

Abstract

The genomic research has grown by the advancement of sequencing technologies, which aim to capture the "totality" of life diversity by progressing from single strain to species or even higher taxa. Out of this scientific progress and inquisitiveness, the term "pangenome" was created. The goal of a pangenome is to represent all of a species genetic variation. It divides the genome into core, accessory and unique genes. Since the introduction of pangenomics, many software programs have been actively used for pangenome analysis. This review focuses on providing a snapshot of useful tools with their use, execution and computational details. In addition to tools for pangenome, the components, approaches, mechanism of variation, applications and challenges associated with pangenome analysis are also discussed in this article. Here, we have also discussed the increasing trend of bacterial pangenome studies with few studies and their significant findings. It has been proved that pangenomics is useful for understanding the clade of bacteria that helps in developing strategies for various application based on biological similarities and differences.

Received: 18 January 2024 | Revised: 24 May 2024 | Accepted: 5 June 2024

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.