Microbial pathogen genomes - new strategies for identifying therapeutic and vaccine targets

Efficient mining of genomic sequence information from multiple pathogens for therapeutic and vaccine targets requires efficient tools. Fortunately, robust methods applicable to whole genomes have been developed and applied in the past few years to identify genes essential for growth or virulence and to detect potential vaccine targets. Successful approaches to identify potential therapeutic targets include a variety of ingenious uses of nearly random transposon insertions, more directed methods such as antisense and insertion-duplication mutagenesis, and expression profiling facilitated by microarrays. Vaccine targets have been identified by gene fusion and expression experiments to discover gene products that are immunogenic in humans or animal models. All genome-wide methods require focused secondary assays to validate the findings, but these genomic methods excel at reducing to a manageable number the genes to be examined further. This editorial reviews the latest developments in genome-wide target identification tools.