Relation between Insertion Sequences and Genome Rearrangements in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

During evolution of microorganisms genomes underwork have different changes in their lengths, gene orders, and gene contents. Investigating these structural rearrangements helps to understand how genomes have been modified over time. Some elements that play an important role in genome rearrangements are called insertion sequences (ISs), they are the simplest types of transposable elements (TEs) that widely spread within prokaryotic genomes. ISs can be defined as DNA segments that have the ability to move (cut and paste) themselves to another location within the same chromosome or not. Due to their ability to move around, they are often presented as responsible of some of these genomic recombination. Authors of this research work have regarded this claim, by checking if a relation between insertion sequences (ISs) and genome rearrangements can be found. To achieve this goal, a new pipeline that combines various tools has firstly been designed, for detecting the distribution of ORFs that belongs to each IS category. Secondly, links between these predicted ISs and observed rearrangements of two close genomes have been investigated, by seeing them with the naked eye, and by using computational approaches. The proposal has been tested on 18 complete bacterial genomes of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, leading to the conclusion that IS3 family of insertion sequences are related to genomic inversions.