Genomes 2008, Paris #2

Several stimulating talks so far today. A highlight was the announcement from Erick Denamur of Genoscope that they have finished 6 new E. coli strains. One of the nice findings from the talk was a very nice phylogenetic reconstruction of the E. coli (and Shigella) groups. To the consternation of Mark Pallen he made the claim for K12 being the closest strain to the common ancestor of E. coli. This was justified, on questioning, not just by genome size, but the gene composition. Mark will defend his view that K-12 is neither archetype nor ancestor later on today. It will be interesting to scrutinise the data further - the Coliscope project homepage does not let have a link to download the data, but we expect it will be there soon.