Inferring bacterial pangenomes with gene-based approaches

The advent of the whole-genome sequencing era in bacteria led to both the initial definition of the term 'pangenome' and the rapid realisation that pangenomic methods would be indispensable to understanding bacterial genomics. Due to the rapidly rising scale of bacterial genomics of the early 2010's coupled with the computational constraints of the time, many bacterial pangenome methods were developed focusing exclusively on protein-coding DNA sequences. This type of method remains widely used to this day, and they continue to be actively developed and extended beyond their initial constraints, including their limitation to protein-coding regions. In this webinar, we will discuss how these methods work and why they are particularly useful in understanding bacterial pangenomes, as well as survey recent and ongoing developments to these methods.