Evaluation of DNA Microarray Approach for Identifying Strain-Specific Genes

We evaluated the usefulness of DNA microarray as a comparative genomics tool, and tested the validity of the cutoff values for defining absent genes in test genomes. Three genome-sequenced E. coli strains (K-12, EDL933, and CFT073) were subjected to comparative genomic hybridization with DNA microarrays covering almost all ORFs of the reference strain K-12, and the microarray results were compared with the results obtained from in silico analyses of genome sequences. For defining the K-12 ORFs absent in test genomes (reference strain-specific ORFs), we applied and evaluated the cutoff level of -1. The average sequence similarity between ORFs, to which corresponding spots showed a log-ratio of>-1, was $96.9{\pm}4.8$. The numbers of spots showing a log-ratio of <-1 (P<0.05, t-test) were 90 (2.5%) and 417 (10.6%) for the EDL933 genome and the CFT073 genome, respectively. Frequency of false negatives (FN) was ca. 0.2, and the cutoff level of -1.3 was required to achieve the FN of 0.1. The average sequence similarity of the false negative ORFs was $77.8{\pm}14.8$, indicating that the majority of the false negatives were caused by highly divergent genes. We concluded that the microarray is useful for identifying missing or divergent ORFs in closely related prokaryotic genomes.