Arcady Mushegian, “Foundations of Comparative Genomics”, 2007 is a science book on genomics. It contains reference to an article: A. Mushegian, and E. Koonin, “A minimal gene set for cellular life derived by comparison of complete bacterial genomes”, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 93, year 1996, page 10,268-10,273. Hans Christian Gram in 1884 discovered that “crystal violet” could be used to classify the bacterial kingdom into two broad groupings. Mushegian and Koonin compared the genomes of a gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria and concluded the minimal number of protein genes is 256. A tabulation of the proteins is shown below with fractions of “Cell Function Systems”. Of the top two fractions” 0.3695 “Translation”, and 0.1322 “Energy” were 94 and 34 proteins, respectively. These two “cell function sytems” are associated with “kwashiorkor” (protein-starvation) and caloric-starvation. Again, Mushegian and Koonin determined that the minimal number of proteins for cellular life is 256 proteins for the bacterial kingdom.
