  The number of available genomes of prokaryotic organisms is rapidly growing
enabling comparative genomics studies. The comparison of genomes of organisms
with a common phenotype, habitat or phylogeny often shows that these genomes
share some common contents. Collecting rules expressing common genome traits
depending on given factors is useful, as such rules could be used for quality
control or for identifying interesting exceptions and formulating hypothesis.
Automatizing the rules verification using computation tools requires the
definition of a representation schema. In this study, we present EGC (Expected
Genome Contents), a flat-text file format for the representation of expectation
rules about the content of prokaryotic genomes. A parser for the EGC format has
been implemented using the TextFormats software library, accompanied by a set
of related Python packages.
