Editor's Introduction to This Issue

Understanding a pathogen's genome is important for controlling infectious disease, in addition to determining its scientific impact. Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as an important opportunistic pathogen that causes nosocomial infections, such as pneumonia, bacteremia, and sepsis. Given that iron is one of the essential nutrients for living organisms, including pathogens, the survival mechanism of Acinetobacter baumannii in iron-limited environments is important. Regarding this issue, Dr. Man Hwan Oh's group of Dankook University reviewed the gene clusters involved in the biosynthesis and transport of acinetobactin, an iron-chelating molecule involved in competition with host cells for iron, in Acinetobacter baumannii. There are two articles on genome data management and in silico modeling. One study presents an integrated geographic information system (GIS)-ontology application for handling microbial genome data, and the other one validates the biological closeness of the predicted in silico model to infer structure-function relationships and the molecular dynamics of substrate binding in human fatty acid.