What is Mycoplasma mobile?
Mycoplasmas are members of the class Mollicutes, a large group of bacteria that lack a cell wall and have a characteristically low G+C content (Razin et al. 1998). These diverse organisms are parasites in a wide range of hosts, including humans, animals, insects, plants, and cells grown in tissue culture (Razin et al. 1998). Aside from their role as potential pathogens, Mycoplasmas are of interest because they evolved from Gram-positive eubacteria by a drastic reduction of genome size, resulting in the loss of many biosynthetic abilities. With genome sizes smaller than 1 Mb, they have been described as the “smallest free-living organisms”, and are considered to be the best representatives for the concept of a minimal cell (Mushegian and Koonin 1996). When this project first started, the complete nucleotide sequences of seven Mycoplasma genomes were known: Mycoplasma genitalium (Fraser et al. 1995), Mycoplasma pneumoniae (Himmelreich et al. 1996), Ureaplasma urealyticum (Glass et al. 20
