Making life difficult for Clostridium difficile: augmenting the pathogen’s metabolic model with transcriptomic and codon usage data for better therapeutic target characterization

摘要

Background Clostridium difficile is a bacterium which can infect various animal species, including humans. Infection with this bacterium is a leading healthcare-associated illness. A better understanding of this organism and the relationship between its genotype and phenotype is essential to the search for an effective treatment. Genome-scale metabolic models contain all known biochemical reactions of a microorganism and can be used to investigate this relationship.