Neisseria gonorrhoeae strain FA1090

The Principle Investigator on this project is Dr. David Dyer, Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the OUHSC and Director of the Laboratory for Genomics and Bioinformatics. Neisseria gonorrhoeae is an obligate human pathogen that infects the urogenital tract to cause gonorrhea. Although disease in males is typically an uncomplicated urogenital infection, in females the infection can progress to more serious complications including salpingitis and pelvic inflammatory disease.

Despite aggressive public education and safer sex practices, N. gonorrhoeae remains a significant pathogen causing approximately 300,000 cases of gonorrhea in the US each year. There is currently no vaccine to prevent gonococcal infection, and after disease an individual remains susceptible and me be re-infected. Antibiotic resistance is a continuing clinical and public health problem.

This gonococcal genome project as conducted in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Roe on the OU Norman campus. The genome consists of 2,153,924 bp, encoding 2,076 open reading frames. Thirty percent of the ORFS are annotated as conserved hypothetical proteins with 36% of these proteins specific to the Neisseria genus. The gonococcal genome contains a large portion of repeated sequences, including 4 ribosomal RNA operons, 11 opacity protein genes, 8 pilin inverting gene loci and numerous transposon fragments. In fact, we identified 267 repeat regions greater than 100bp within the gonococcal genome. In addition, we identified 57 tandem repeat regions that were associated with ORFs and thus may act as functional motifs, being involved in gene regulation by slipped strand mispairing.

These data have been submitted for publication to the Proceedings of the National Academy for Science (USA).

The Neisseria gonorrhoeae genome sequencing project is a collaboration between Dr. David Dyer, Ph.D. of the Laboratory for Microbial Genomics and Dr. Bruce Roe, Ph.D. of the Advanced Center for Genome Technology. The data for this project is hosted on Dr. Roe's website, and can be found here. (Link will open in a new window)