| Campylobacter jejuni, the number one causative agent of bacterial food poisoning in the developed world, display specific strain-strain variation in their genomic DNA particularly in regions of the genome associated with virulence. The Galen laboratory provided me with the whole genome sequence of C.jejuni 81-176, a highly virulent strain of C.jejuni. Whole genome alignment and comparison of C. jejuni 81-176 with the annotated whole genome sequences of C. jejuni NCTC 11168 and C. jejuni RM 1221 revealed 64 open reading frames unique to C.jejuni 81-176. Over 50% of the 64 potential genes have been annotated as having a specific product function while over a third code for hypothetical proteins with no identifiable gene product. A number of the open reading frames have been annotated as genes that have the potential to infer extra fitness on C.jejuni 81-176 in its colonisation of the human intestinal tract. This information combined with the two other annotated strains of C. jejuni will improve the power of the Campylobacter jejuni microarray as a tool for genomotyping. |