title: A new drug design strategy: Killing drug resistant bacteria by deactivating their hypothetical genes.
abstract: Despite that a bacterial genome is complicated by large numbers of horizontally transferred (HT) genes and function unknown hypothetical (FUN) genes, the Genic-Transcriptional-Stop-Signals-Ratio (TSSR) of a genome shows that HT and FUN genes are complementary to all other genes in the genome. When HT or certain FUN genes are omitted from the Escherichia coli K-12 genome, its Genomic-TSSR value becomes totally incomparable to other E. coli strains. The Genic-TSSR correlation tree of a pathogen shows that some FUN genes would form a unique cluster. Removing these genes by site-specific mutation or gene-knockout should lead to the demise of this pathogen.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Biological Sciences , Bioinformatics Program, University of Memphis , Memphis , Tennessee , USA.
authors.forename: Tit-Yee
authors.initials: TY
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.affiliation: b Department of Planning and Research , National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium , Pingtung , Taiwan, Republic of China.
authors.forename: Jimmy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kuo
mesh_terms: D015195:Drug Design; D024881:Drug Resistance, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics*; D048168:Escherichia coli K12 / Q000235:genetics*; D022761:Gene Transfer, Horizontal / Q000502:physiology; D005798:Genes, Bacterial / Q000502:physiology; D016680:Genome, Bacterial / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans
keywords: Antibiotic resistance; drug targets; genome organization; hypothetical genes; stop codon signals