Mycoplasma, which was used to create the first “synthetic life”, has been an important species in the emerging field, synthetic biology. However, essential genes, an important concept of synthetic biology, for both M. mycoides and M. capricolum, as well as 14 other Mycoplasma with available genomes, are still unknown. We have developed a gene essentiality prediction algorithm that incorporates information of biased gene strand distribution, homologous search and codon adaptation index. The algorithm, which achieved an accuracy of 80.8% and 78.9% in self-consistence and cross-validation tests, respectively, predicted 5880 essential genes in the 16 Mycoplasma genomes. The intersection set of essential genes in available Mycoplasma genomes consists of 153 core essential genes. The predicted essential genes (available from pDEG, tubic.tju.edu.cn/pdeg) and the proposed algorithm can be helpful for studying minimal Mycoplasma genomes as well as essential genes in other genomes.

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