Functional genomics of food-borne pathogens Habilitationsschrift vorgelegt von Thilo M. Fuchs Lehrstuhl für Mikrobielle Ökologie Department für Biowissenschaftliche Grundlagen Fakultät Wissenschaftszentrum Weihenstephan für Ernährung, Landnutzung und Umwelt Freising 2006 Contents page 1. Summary 1 2. Introduction: functional genomics 2 3. Genome-wide insertional-duplication mutagenesis (IDM) 8 4. The essential genes set of Salmonella typhimurium 12 5. Intracellular replication of Listeria monocytogenes 19 6. Association of Yersinia enterocolitica with invertebrates 24 7. Acknowledgement 31 8. Bibliography 32 9. Author’s publications and patents 39 10. Curriculum vitae 42 11. Appendix: selected publications 44 Summary The growing number of complete microbial genome sequences and the ready availability of their annotation provide a powerful data base for studying the biology of microorganisms. In this work, two distinct high-throughput approaches are described to exploit genomics of pathogenic bacteria, insertional-duplication mutagenesis (IDM) and expression profiling using the luciferase reporter system.