Astrobiology

The smallest bacterial genomes characterised to date

by Dr Anthony Poole (Department of Molecular Biology and Functional Genomics)

Europe/Stockholm
Arrhenius Labs

Arrhenius Labs

Description
I will talk about the recent papers published in Science that represent that smallest bacterial genomes characterised to date. My aim will be to put these observations into a wider perspective - in particular, I will focus on what this means in terms of our understanding of the question of how small a genome can be, and how many genes it takes to run an organism.