You might learn a lot about that house—the rooms, the doors, the furniture—but you would miss the bigger story: the streets, the neighborhoods, and all the ways the city changes from one place to another.

Something similar happens when scientists study bacterial genomes one at a time.

Over the past decade, researchers have collected thousands of bacterial genomes. These genomes contain an enormous amount of information about how bacteria survive, adapt, and evolve. But comparing thousands of individual genomes can quickly become a computational maze.

That is where PANORAMA enters the story.

Developed by Jérôme Arnoux and colleagues, PANORAMA is a computational tool designed to explore bacterial pangenomes—the complete collection of genetic possibilities found across a species or group of related organisms. Instead of looking at every genome as an isolated object, the approach represents their shared and variable genetic features as a graph.

Think of this graph as a giant subway map.

Some stations appear on almost every route. These represent genes that are highly conserved. Other stations appear only on certain routes, representing genes that some bacteria possess while others do not. By looking at the entire network, scientists can begin to see not just *what genes exist*, but how they are organized and how biological systems are distributed across populations.

The researchers put PANORAMA to the test using 941 genomes of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium important in human health. They used the tool to investigate biological systems, including bacterial defense mechanisms against viruses known as bacteriophages. They then expanded the analysis to more than 6,000 genomes from four Enterobacteriaceae species.

The result is more than a faster way to process data.

PANORAMA allows researchers to ask a bigger question: What can an entire microbial species do, genetically speaking?

By comparing pangenomes, the researchers could identify systems shared between species as well as distinctive features. They could also find recurring genomic locations where genetic material is inserted—clues that may reveal common evolutionary processes.

And this is perhaps the most exciting part of the story.

Every bacterial genome is like a page in a huge evolutionary book. Until recently, reading thousands of those pages together was difficult. PANORAMA provides a way to turn those pages into a map, allowing scientists to see patterns that might disappear when each genome is studied separately.

The study, published in PLOS Computational Biology in July 2026, presents PANORAMA as a foundation for large-scale comparative pangenomics. The software and accompanying analysis resources are openly available, giving other researchers the opportunity to explore microbial diversity themselves.

So the story is not really about one bacterium or one genome.

It is about changing the way we look at life.

Instead of asking, “What is inside this genome?”, scientists can increasingly ask, “What is the full genetic landscape of this species—and how did it become this way?”

And sometimes, when you stop looking at one house and finally see the whole city, the most interesting discoveries are hiding in the streets between them.

Read more at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013856

A recent study by Webster and Chapman introduces Buscogeny (https://github.com/Jwebster89/Buscogeny), an open-source bioinformatics pipeline designed to make this process easier. The tool uses BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs), which identifies conserved genes that are expected to occur as single copies in particular groups of organisms. These genes act like evolutionary landmarks, allowing researchers to compare genomes and investigate their relationships.

Buscogeny brings several steps of phylogenomic analysis into one workflow. It identifies BUSCO genes, extracts and aligns their sequences, removes unreliable regions, combines information from multiple genes, and uses the resulting data to construct a phylogenetic tree. It also provides quality-control information, helping researchers identify genomes that may be too incomplete for reliable analysis.

The authors demonstrate the usefulness of Buscogeny with bacterial and fungal genomes, including Alternaria. This is particularly valuable because fungal genomes can vary greatly in quality and annotation. Ultimately, Buscogeny helps transform massive amounts of genomic data into an understandable evolutionary story. Each DNA sequence becomes a clue, each conserved gene becomes a landmark, and together these clues reveal a picture of how life is connected.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10123-025-00752-6?

Address of the bookmark: http://msaprobs.sourceforge.net/homepage.htm#latest

Caretta, a multiple structure alignment suite meant for homologous but sequentially divergent protein families which consistently returns accurate alignments with a higher coverage than current state-of-the-art tools. Caretta is available as a GUI and command-line application and additionally outputs an aligned structure feature matrix for a given set of input structures, which can readily be used in downstream steps for supervised or unsupervised machine learning. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bioinformatics.nl/caretta/

More at https://github.com/mills-lab/svelter/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mills-lab/svelter/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PapenfussLab/gridss

Jarvis et al. (2014)

Reference https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00412-018-0685-6

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/lkalesinskas/splot

https://prakharg24.github.io/papers/401851.full.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://prakharg24.github.io/papers/401851.full.pdf