pan-genome
pangenome
supragenome

Comparative genomics approaches are also being used to understand more about the pan-genome.

In the open pan-genome, genes may be further characterized as dispensable or strain specific.

A pan-genome is the entire gene pool for that pathogen species, and includes genes that are not shared by all strains.

Another example for the latter can be seen in a comparison of the sizes of the core and the pan-genome of Prochlorococcus.

The core genome set is logically much smaller than the pan-genome, which is used by different ecotypes of Prochlorococcus.

Pan-genome and core genome literature also tends to have a bias towards reporting on prokaryotic pathogen organisms.

The significance of the pan-genome arises in an evolutionary context, especially with relevance to metagenomics, but is also used in a broader genomics context.

With the advent of next generation sequencing technologies the team was able to conduct a comparison of 13 Ehux strains revealing the first ever algal 'pan-genome.

For example, Streptococcus agalactiae, which exists in diverse biological niches, has a broader pan-genome when compared with the more environmentally isolated Bacillus anthracis.

Extrapolation suggested that the gene reservoir in the S. agalactiae pan-genome is vast and that new unique genes will continue to be identified even after sequencing hundreds of genomes.

Evidence we present indicates that this capacity can be explained in part by its pan-genome, the first of its kind reported for what was thought to be a single microbial eukaryotic algal species.

Caution may need to be exercised when extending the definition of a pan-genome or a core-genome to the other pathogen organisms; this is because there is no formal evidence of the properties of these pan-genomes.

The pan-genome includes the "core genome" containing genes present in all strains, a "dispensable genome" containing genes present in two or more strains, and finally "unique genes" specific to single strains.

In molecular biology a pan-genome (or supra-genome) describes the full complement of genes in a clade (typically applied to species in bacteria and archaea), which can have large variation in gene content among closely related strains).

"This supports a growing understanding that antibiotic resistance is natural, ancient, and hard wired in the microbial pangenome," the study's authors wrote.

A biome may contain very large scale omics information, such as metagenome and pangenome where genomic sequences are mass-produced.

This very large variety of component genes has been interpreted to mean that two-thirds of the E. coli pangenome originated in other species and arrived through the process of horizontal gene transfer.