Comparison of TASmania and TAfinder hits.

Using M.tuberculosis as a proof-of-principle, a list of manually curated, new and promising TASmania-specific hits is shown in Table 1, compared to the results obtained by TAfinder on the same genomes. (A) Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv. (B) Mycobacterium smegmatis HMC2 155. (C) Caulobacter crescentus CB15. (D) Staphylococcus aureus NCTC8325. These TASmania-specific TA hits correspond mostly to: i) type I or type IV systems; ii) orphan loci; iii) guilt-by-association “x” loci iv) unusual combinations (“TT”, “AA”). This confirms that our strategy of not filtering out any unusual TAS operon structures or protein lengths allows us to be more discovery-orientated. Including the guilt-by-association “x” cognates is also useful when looking for uncharacterized TAS families.