Abstract
Genomes of the month close relatives
Four new bacterial genomes have been deposited with GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ since last month's Genome Update. The list is shown in Table 1 and represents a wide range of organisms, with three of the four organisms having close relatives that have already been sequenced: the saprophytic soil bacterium Bacillus licheniformis, which is a close cousin of Bacillus subtilis; Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, which is thought to represent the species from which Yersinia pestis originated; the spirochaete Borrelia garinii; and the compost bacterium Symbiobacterium thermophilum, which depends on the presence of other Bacillus bacteria for growth (Ueda et al., 2001). At the time of writing, reports on the Bacillus licheniformis and Y. pseudotuberculosis genomes have been published, which will be briefly discussed below.