Organism

Bacteroides fragilis is an anaerobic, Gram-negative, pleomorphic to rod-shaped bacterium. It is part of the normal microbiota of the human colon and is generally commensal, but can cause infection if displaced into the bloodstream or surrounding tissue following surgery, disease, or trauma. (ref)

Map

A collection of 232 reference genomes were downloaded from the NCBI Genome database on July 22, 2021 as part of a general survey of the normal human microbiota.

Notes

The most notable feature of this map is the group of genomes which cluster at the bottom of the map, showing differences from the larger group both on the basis of total nucleotide content (represented with the dendrogram on the left) as well as overall gene content. It would be interesting to know if this remarkable difference between reference genomes annotated as B. fragilis has already been recognized by researchers in the field.