Artificial intelligent assistant

Can different bacteria strains of same species have different genomic sizes? Can two different strains of a single species have different genomic sizes? I am not asking about plasmid. Can they have different sizes of actual chromosome?

Yes, and one could argue that the differences between two strains of the same species are entirely due to their collections of genes (and therefore different genome sizes).

Take the plant pathogen _Pseudomonas syringae_ , for example. There are many different strains, categorized by the plant hosts they cause disease on. This host range is determined by different collections of virulence genes in their genomes. So although they are the same species, they can be remarkably different in their genomes. See this (open access) paper by Baltrus, et al for more information.

A point to remember... "species" is a manmade concept, and there can be different definitions. Some species can have less than 90% similarity at the genome level!

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