Complete genome sequences of important bacterial pathogens and industrial organisms hold significant …

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Genomic insights - lifestyles, adaptations and pathogenic mechanisms
• Why sequence multiple species and strains?
• Making sense of the genome piles
• PLoS ONE Prokaryotic Genomes Collection
• References

The possibilities and proposals towards computational processing of genome data as discussed appear mind boggling at this stage, but ultimately scientists will be empowered to swiftly interpret their own experimental results within the context of other published research findings in a more interactive and collaborative way. These advances underscore the need for important biological information such as genome sequences and microarray data sets to be made freely available and the literature describing the data interpretation to be available through Open Access platforms such as PLoS ONE. Since PLoS ONE publishes research through extensible markup language (XML), it is possible to quickly exchange experimental results and their interpretations across different platforms. This in turn simplifies utilization and processing of genomic information contained in research publications so that details such as decipherment of novel pathways or evolutionary relationships etc. could be discussed globally and interpreted through community genomics environments.

To this end, ‘PLoS ONE prokaryotic genomes collection’ represents a novel initiative to compile a permanent archive of all important articles describing whole genome sequence based biology of prokaryotic organisms. This collection of articles will facilitate understanding of the biology and lifestyle of the underlying organisms not only through main contents of articles but also via information from external sources that discuss and link to the results, such as citations from PubMed Central, Google Scholar and Scopus; evaluations and ratings at Faculty of 1000; bookmarks from social networking sites such as CiteULike and Connotea; and blog posts from experts and readers in the field. Just like other PLoS content, it will be possible to make utilization of individual articles interactive for the users (human or machine) to harness elements of research (annotation tables, phylogenetic trees, evolutionary hierarchies, gene expression data, graphs, texts etc.) and associated content in the form of relevant discussions (and raw data posted in response to a discussion). This content can be processed in a variety of computational formats such as graphs or networks that can be inspected visually, cured manually or mined computationally. Linking therefore the secondary contents and Science 2.0 based enhancements to published information and their subsequent harnessing through different knowledge-platforms is likely to underpin formation of new ideas and insights in a more holistic and interdisciplinary manner. Such novel theses in the form of alternative or even more provocative interpretations could ultimately be linked back to the original genome sequences thus completing a cycle of information sharing through Open Access.