Organism

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a common encapsulated, Gram-negative, strict aerobic (although can grow anaerobically in the presence of nitrate), rod-shaped bacterium that can cause disease in plants and animals, including humans (wiki).

Map

A collection of 449 reference genomes were downloaded from the NCBI Genome database on December 22, 2021 as part of a general survey of bacteria with importance to human health.

Notes

One of the most striking features of this map is the presence of a large genetic element which is found across a phylogenetically diverse subset of isolates. The presence of this genetic element is evident from the pattern of genes indicated in the right-hand orange box outlined below.

When the view is expanded on this region, we can see that this region contains dozens of genes, and includes interesting functions like type III secretion, two-component signalling, bacteriocin, and mercury transport. The presence of plasmid-associated genes suggests that this element may be extra-chromosomal, but further inspection would be needed to test this hypothesis.

By moving your mouse over the interactive figure at the top of the page, you can read out the names of the isolates which contain this genetic element, and which may be interesting to compare to their non-encoding relatives.

Of course, this is not the only genetic element which is distributed horizontally across the species. The expanded view of the left-hand box from the image above is expanded below.

In that display you can see many different groups of genes which are found across collections of clades which do not share a common ancestor. For a researcher with an interest in the different phenotypes displayed by isolates of this particular organism, it may be interesting to compare isolates on the basis of the presence and absence of those genetic elements.