title: Three computational tools for predicting bacterial essential genes.
abstract: Essential genes are those genes indispensable for the survival of any living cell. Bacterial essential genes constitute the cornerstones of synthetic biology and are often attractive targets in the development of antibiotics and vaccines. Because identification of essential genes with wet-lab ways often means expensive economic costs and tremendous labor, scientists changed to seek for alternative way of computational prediction. Aiming to help to solve this issue, our research group (CEFG: group of Computational, Comparative, Evolutionary and Functional Genomics, http://cefg.uestc.edu.cn) has constructed three online services to predict essential genes in bacterial genomes. These freely available tools are applicable for single gene sequences without annotated functions, single genes with definite names, and complete genomes of bacterial strains. To ensure reliable predictions, the investigated species should belong to the same family (for EGP) or phylum (for CEG_Match and Geptop) with one of the reference species, respectively. As the pilot software for the issue, predicting accuracies of them have been assessed and compared with existing algorithms, and note that all of other published algorithms have not any formed online services. We hope these services at CEFG will help scientists and researchers in the field of essential genes.
authors: Computational, Comparative, Evolutionary and Functional Genomics Group (CEFG), School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, No. 4, Section 2, North Jianshe Road, Chengdu, 610054, China, fbguo@uestc.edu.cn.
authors: Feng-Biao
authors: FB
authors: Guo
authors: Yuan-Nong
authors: YN
authors: Ye
authors: Lu-Wen
authors: LW
authors: Ning
authors: Wen
authors: W
authors: Wei
mesh_terms: D019540:Area Under Curve; D001483:Base Sequence; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D048168:Escherichia coli K12 / Q000235:genetics; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005798:Genes, Bacterial; D020043:Genes, Essential; D023281:Genomics; D005810:Multigene Family