The Eight Completely Sequenced Organisms Used in this Study
| Abbrev. | Organism | Phylogeny | Size (Mb) | Proteins | Reference | ||
| Ecol | Escherichia coli | Bacteria | Proteobacteria | gamma subdivision | 4.653 | 4283 | Blattner et al. 1997 |
| Hinf | Haemophilus influenzae | Bacteria | Proteobacteria | gamma subdivision | 1.830 | 1703 | Fleischmann et al. 1995 |
| Hpyl | Helicobacter pylori | Bacteria | Proteobacteria | epsilon subdivision | 1.667 | 1566 | Tomb et al. 1997 |
| Mjan | Methanococcus jannaschii | Archaea | Euryarchaeota | Methanococcales | 1.739 | 1736 | Bult et al. 1996 |
| Mgen | Mycoplasma genitalium | Bacteria | Firmicutes | Bacillus/Clostridium | .58 | 468 | Fraser et al. 1995 |
| Mpne | Mycoplasma pneumoniae | Bacteria | Firmicutes | Bacillus/Clostridium | .816 | 677 | Himmelreich et al. 1996 |
| Scer | Saccharomyces cerevisiae | Eukaryota | Fungi | Ascomycota | 12.068 | 5932 | Goffeau et al. 1997 |
| Syne | Synechocystis sp. | Bacteria | Cyanobacteria | Chroococcales | 3.573 | 3168 | Kaneko et al. 1996 |
[i] This table lists the currently published microbial genomes, discussed in the text, from the TIGR web site (http://www.tigr.org/tdb/mdb/mdb.html). The first column lists the abbreviations that are used for the figures in this paper, corresponding to the genome name in the second column. Column three shows the top three levels of the phylogenetic lineage of the organisms as shown in the NCBI Taxonomy Browser (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/tax.html), which is sufficient to locate the taxa on the traditional tree. The size of the complete genome of the particular organism is shown in the fourth column with the total number of proteins in the organism listed on the next column. The final column lists the original publication citation for each of the genomes.