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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Minimal Gene-Set Machinery

subject

description

All known living beings are made of cells, each one of which stores in its genome all of the information required for its correct functioning. The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies and improvements in bioinformatics tools have allowed the complete sequencing, functional analysis and comparison of thousands of genomes from different species, helping research groups to delineate the minimal set of functions necessary to keep a cell alive under defined environmental conditions. This knowledge can not only be used to obtain a better understanding of the phenomenon of life, but also has many direct biotechnological and biomedical implications. Keywords: minimal genome; orthologous genes; non-orthologous gene displacement (NOD); translatome; free-diffusing cell; minimal metabolism