WALNUT CREEK, Calif.--The US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute said this month that it took "one day's production capacity" over a two day period to complete the shotgun genomic sequence of the 2.8 million base pairs of Enterococcus faecium, a bacterium that is the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections.
The work, funded by the DOE and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was a collaborative effort among the Joint Genome Institute, the University of Texas Health Science Center, and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Now, researchers at the institute and Baylor will complete the final assembly and provide a more complete analysis of its genetic structure.