Functional and evolutionary genomics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis: insights from genomic deletions in 100 strains.

To better understand genome function and evolution in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the genomes of 100 epidemiologically well characterized clinical isolates were interrogated by DNA microarrays and sequencing. We identified 68 different large-sequence polymorphisms (comprising 186,137 bp, or 4.2% of the genome) that are present in H37Rv, but absent from one or more clinical isolates.