Our previous work on TB Mobile demonstrated how the app can be a useful resource to filter by target, essentiality, human homolog and similarity search [30].
This study establishes benchmarks for gene essentiality prediction, presents a community resource for future comparison with this benchmark, and provides insights into factors influencing the ability to predict gene essentiality from functional genetic screens.
This observation provides additional confirmation that essentiality data represents a valuable resource, as it helps validate or discard gene functions supported by reasonably good but non-conclusive evidence.
However, experimentally assaying the essentiality of their coding genes is resource intensive and not feasible for all bacterial organisms, in particular if they are infective.
Gene age, duplication status and essentiality data was downloaded from the OGEE resource, mapping was done using the gene identifiers.
Systematic evaluation of gene essentiality has proved to be a valuable resource for investigating gene functions; knockout mutant collections have been recently built in this aim for a number of bacteria [ 5- 8].
To further confirm this potential essentiality enrichment we downloaded the set of essential genes identified from experiments in the OGEE resource (see Methods).
Figure 6: In silico elucidation of the mechanisms of essentiality for the five genes selectively essential in ccRCC.
The mouse KO database provides a valuable resource to study the genomic features of vertebrate evolution from gene essentiality [ 9, 10, 45] to pleiotropy [ 46].
Several computational studies are also available [ 33, 34], adding to the resource base, making it feasible to address complex issues such as gene essentiality for this pathogen from an integrated perspective.
Essentiality tests suggested that neither sig1 nor sig2 is essential under all conditions.
