Zeitschrift für Informatik und Systembiologie

Using Different Bioinformatics Software Tools for Determining the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Dependence in Staphhylococcus aureus

Abstract

Alsuhibany SA and Alsuhibany N

Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) is a Gram-positive bacterium that occurs in microscopic bunches similar to grapes. In general, S. aureus shows two different colonies; on agar dishes S. aureus forms huge golden yellow colonies, while on blood agar dishes it has haemolytic properties. Recently, different major studies have discovered CO2-dependent S. aureus strains that can be found as an inhabitant of small colony variants (SCV) S. aureus, which can cause recurrent and persistent infections. Although it has been investigated the mechanism of this CO2 dependence, this paper aims to use different bioinformatics software tools, such as MUMmer, BLAST, Jalview and ClustalW, in order to compare and search for the differences in the enzymes involved in pathways that can be altered in the CO2-dependent S. aureus strain. That is, the entire genome of CO2-dependent S. aureus strain was compared against another strain, not CO2-dependent using the software tool MUMmer. Based on this tool, the results show that the plots of the CO2-dependent strain against the COL and Mu50 strains did not show any gaps, while the connected thick diagonal line reveals strong similarities between the sequences in comparison to the thin diagonal line. Surprisingly, the results of using BLAST alignment tool did not illustrate any obvious mutations. Besides, the comparison between a number of strains and the CO2-dependent S. aureus strain was carried out using the ClustalW alignment tool and Jalview software; consequently it did not show any observable mutations, as well.