A Semi-Quantitative, Synteny-Based Method to Improve Functional Predictions for Hypothetical and Poorly Annotated Bacterial and Archaeal Genes
Figure 3
Synteny (gene order conservation) versus sequence divergence (average normalized bit score) in pairwise comparisons of 638 Bacterial and Archaeal genomes.
Orthologs that are sometimes in predicted operons (operon genes) are compared separately from those that are never in operons (non-operon genes). The circled outliers come from comparisons of endosymbiont genomes, which have very small genomes and greater than expected conserved gene order in non-operon genes.