Reading Review Questions – Chapter 9
The Power of Bacteria

2. The genomes of a number of bacterial pathogens have now been completely sequenced. How might the availability of this information affect the definition of virulence factors?

4. Why are in vivo expression technologies continuing to turn up housekeeping genes rather than the “virulence genes” the researchers who developed these methods originally envisioned?

6. If you have the genome sequence of a bacterial pathogen, would you still need to clone genes or does cloning become obsolete?

8. Suppose you perform an RNA-Seq experiment comparing RNA samples prepared from a bacterium isolated from the blood of an infected animal to that grown in rich tissue culture medium in vitro. You detect changes in the relative transcript amounts of several genes for the bacterium grown in blood versus culture medium. How would you interpret the results? What does it tell you about the virulence of this bacterium?