Tandem repeats in complete bacterial genome sequences: sequence and structural analyses for comparative studies

A series of complete bacterial genome sequences have recently become available and powerful methods have been developed for the identification of tandem repeats on a very large scale. It is thus possible to derive extensive comparative descriptions of such repeats at the level of complete genomes, as illustrated here for three different bacterial genomes: Escherichia coli, Haemophilus influenzae, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Such sequence analyses can be usefully complemented by structural characterisations of the repeats.