Application Example:
Bordetella pertussis is a highly contagious gram-negative bacterium which causes whooping cough in humans. Related species include Bordetella bronchiseptica and Bordetella parapertussis which also infect the respiratory system of other mammals and cause diseases such as kennel cough in dogs and atrophic rhinitis in pigs. Using SynaCompare in the “one to one” nucleotide comparison mode, the genomes of all three bacteria were compared against each other. It was discovered that the B. pertussis genome has a prominent rearrangement (Figure 2 and Figure 3) in comparison to B. bronchiseptica and B. parapertussis which are relatively similar to each other (Figure 4). The significance of this rearrangement to gene regulation in B. pertussis and its relative virulence in humans as compared to other mammals remains unclear. Nonetheless, the result in the SynaCompare dot plot is designed to allow interactive data extraction and further analysis by inference and observation. As shown in Figure 4 users can select a region of interest and right click to conduct further analysis using other SynaSuite applications.