An analysis of initiation codon utilization in the Domain Bacteria - concerns about the quality of bacterial genome annotation.

Using custom software (Inidon) we have examined the initiation codon utilization in 620 complete bacterial genomes downloaded from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The mean utilization of ATG, GTG and TTG codons is 80.1, 11.6 and 7.8 %, respectively. In most cases in which similar species or strains have been analysed the utilization percentages of the three initiation codons are remarkably similar, but in certain cases the results exhibit significant differences.