Figure 5

Distance profile of adjacent M. tuberculosis genes in the same orientation that are functionally linked by the Rosetta Stone, Phylogenetic Profiles or conserved Gene Neighbor methods, compared to adjacent genes in the same orientation that are not linked by these methods. (a) Distance profile of adjacent M. tuberculosis genes in the same orientation linked by either the Rosetta Stone, Phylogenetic Profile or conserved Gene Neighbor method in M. tuberculosis. (b) Distance profile of all other adjacent M. tuberculosis genes in the same orientation, excluding those linked by the Rosetta Stone, Phylogenetic Profiles or conserved Gene Neighbor methods in M. tuberculosis. (c) Distance profile of adjacent genes in the same orientation in experimentally documented operons in E. coli. E. coli operon data obtained from RegulonDB [6]. The linked profile (a) yielded a mean intergenic distance of 27 base pairs, as compared with (b) 94 base pairs for the mean intergenic distance for genes not linked by any of the three methods. This demonstrates that adjacent genes in the same orientation that have small intergenic spacing are more likely to be functionally linked that those that are separated farther apart.