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Pathogen infections are among the leading causes of infirmity and mortality among humans and other animals in the world. Until recently, it has been difficult to compile information to understand the generation of pathogen virulence factors as well as pathogen behaviour in a host environment. The study of pathogenomics attempts to utilize genomic and metagenomics data gathered from high through-put technologies (e.g. sequencing or DNA microarrays), to understand microbe diversity and interaction as well as host-microbe interactions involved in disease states. The bulk of pathogenomics research concerns itself with pathogens that affect human health; however, studies also exist for plant and animal infecting microbes. ==History== In the early investigation of microbial genomics, it was difficult and costly to obtain sequence information for any pathogen. In 1995, the first pathogen genome, that of Haemophilus influenza, was sequenced by traditional Sanger methods. Sanger methods, however, were slow and costly. The emergence of second-generation high-throughput sequencing technologies has allowed for microbial sequence information to be obtained much more quickly and at a considerably lower cost. Largely thanks to second-generation sequencing methods, hundreds of pathogen genomes have been sequenced since 1995. The emergence of second-generation high-through-put sequencing technologies has allowed for microbial sequence information to be obtained much more quickly and at a considerably lower cost. This influx of information is also due to the capacity of sequencing platforms to evaluate the sequences of many organisms in parallel. With the sequences of many organisms available for analysis, scientists, through their investigations, began to challenge some of the earlier tenants of bacterial genome structure. Older paradigms of microbial genomics believed that only a few strains were sufficient to represent a specific bacterial species.〔〔〔 〕 It was thought that bacterial genomes, like eukaryotes, were relatively stable. In 2001, however, the sequences of Escherichia coli 0157:H7 was obtained in a study by Perna and her colleagues; the study showed that two members of the same bacterial species can differ as much as 30% in genomic content. It became evident that sequencing multiple strains for a species, rather than a few selectively chosen ones, was necessary to understand the diversity in a microbial species gene pool. It was also increasingly important to understand how to account for these differences in genomic content across a species strains and how it may contribute to pathogenic behaviour or prevent the formation of pathogens.〔 More recently, the sequenced genomic data have been catalogued in databases and made publicly available online (there also exist non-publicly available databases in the private sector). The availability and influx of this information presses upon those who conduct pathogenomics research to come up with a way of drawing meaningful conclusions from these data. In addition, the availability of such data on the Internet encourages global collaboration of labs. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pathogenomics」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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