The importance of intra-species strain-to-strain diversity is a developing area of genomics and bacterial population biology. The genome of individual strains within the same species may vary appreciably in size and gene content and some of this variation may correspond to important pathogenic differences between individual strains. The pneumococcal genome diversity project developed in response to the public availability of one complete pneumococcal genome at the start of the project. The goal of this project is to provide a sequence data set that addresses intra-species genomic diversity.
Fourteen strains have been chosen to try to span
the breadth of diversity within this species. Up to 20 different 10kbp regions
will be sequenced from each of the 14 strains. These data will provide an important
resource for hypotheses addressing intra-species genetic diversity.
All data is made available within days of its availability to all of the
pneumococcal community at this web site.