2022/08/29 by Connor L. Brown, Connor Brown, James Mullet +11 · 6 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · #Bacterial Genetics and Biotechnology #Bacteriophages and microbial interactions #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
paper · doi:10.1128/aem.00991-22
openalex publication_date 2022/08/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The analysis of bacterial mobile genetic elements (MGEs) in genomic data is a critical step toward profiling the root causes of antibiotic resistance, phenotypic or metabolic diversity, and the evolution of bacterial genera. Existing methods for MGE annotation pose high barriers of biological and computational expertise to properly harness. To bridge this gap, we systematically analyzed 10,776,849 proteins derived from eight databases of MGEs to identify 6,140 MGE protein families that can serve as candidate hallmarks, i.e., proteins that can be used as "signatures" of MGEs to aid annotation. The resulting resource, mobileOG-db, provides a multilevel classification scheme that encompasses plasmid, phage, integrative, and transposable element protein families categorized into five major mobileOG categories and more than 50 minor categories. mobileOG-db thus provides a rich resource for simple and intuitive element annotation that can be integrated seamlessly into existing MGE detection pipelines and colocalization analyses.