Figure 1

The extent of gene reduction and decay in the genome of M. leprae. (a) The percentage of the total potential open reading frames assigned to major cellular functions are shown. (b) Each category has been sub-classified and the number of putative functional genes in M. leprae (after eliminating the pseudogenes) for each subclass are indicated by bold numbers, followed by the corresponding number in M. tuberculosis. The data were obtained from the databases of the M. leprae and M. tuberculosis genome projects [2,4] as annotated by Cole et al. [1,3].