Environmental and Physiological Insights from Microbial Genome Sequences

Facts and ideas presented in this short review are addressed to those computer scientists and mathematicians that want to learn about some open questions on the bioinformatics of microbial organisms. We present some recent results of our group on the statistical analysis of microbial genomes involving the formalization of microbial spaces, metabolic network comparison, minimal gene sets, host-phage adaptation and gene chromosomal organization. The guideline to all results presented here is to derive insights on microbial physiology and habitat directly from genome sequences by means of a purely statistical analysis and an appropriate design of algorithms.