Description:
The human pathogen Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a remarkable minimal organism which primarily colonizes the human lung tissue. To reach distant infection sites, it probably also enters the blood stream. The Mycoplasma genome has constantly undergone reductive changes due to strong adaptation to the convenient conditions and high nutrient availability in its habitat. In turn, this adaptation renders the bacterium dependent on the exploitation of the host tissue. This dependence is reflected by a high number of genes coding for transport proteins with most of them being essential. In the initial ...