[DIYbio] Re: Clustered essential genes, any ideas?

Hey

I have been annotating a Bacillus genome to only have essential genes showing (I'd like to make a minimal Bacillus cell, so far I have selection systems, planned out cloning steps, vectors do to this with, equipment and bacteria needed, ect). Its taken me quite a while but I finally finished. I took the 253 CDSs from subtiwiki http://subtiwiki.uni-goettingen.de/wiki/index.php/Essential_genes (manually, btw. It took forever... but I haven't learned to program yet so it was the only way) Something weird happened though...

Out of the 374 essential proteins and RNAs (give or take 1 or 2, I haven't looked all the way into the RNA part) 109 of the 374 essentials are in a 202kb region.

That's 29% of all the essential genes in a region 5% of the entire genome... They are also all clustered around dnaA (I read somewhere that dnaA is near to the origin, don't quote me I haven't looked for a while)

My idea (note I have only thought about this for a very short while) of why this is is because during the evolution of this cell messing up essential genes with duplications/ recombination would cause those cells to be less fit for their environment, so the recombination and duplication/mutation occured in other parts of the genome.

Do you guys have any idea of why this occurred? I am thinking of trying to annotate the genomes of Mycoplasma genitalium and E coli to see if they are similar (any programmers out there :) ). Perhaps if I do that and find similar results I'll publish in like F1000 or peerj.... That is if this hasn't already been discovered, which I will surprised if I am the first to find this

-Koeng