Bacteria can adapt to environmental fluctuations through genome rearrangement.

Inversions, duplications, translocations, and insertions are common methods of adaptation.

Short-read sequencing can identify various structural variants.

Long-read sequencing enables detection of a greater breadth of structural variants and variants undetectable via short-read sequencing.

Structural variation plays a significant and largely underappreciated role in biology.

Structural variation in bacterial genomes is an important evolutionary driver. Genomic rearrangements, such as inversions, duplications, and insertions, can regulate gene expression and promote niche adaptation. Importantly, many of these variations are reversible and preprogrammed to generate heterogeneity. While many tools have been developed to detect structural variation in eukaryotic genomes, variation in bacterial genomes and metagenomes remains understudied. However, recent advances in genome sequencing technology and the development of new bioinformatic pipelines hold promise in further understanding microbial genomics.

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