The results obtained by Hayes and Borodovsky (35) are clearly at variance with the others (Table 4 ). Although the proportion of claimed outliers is within the range of published numbers for E.coli (14, 16, 24, 34, 35, 37) , 37% of them are method-specific, and the agreement with other methods is weak (Table 4 ). Hayes and Borodovsky have obviously developed an approach based on HMM dealing with specific outliers. Lawrence and Ochman (34) also get a poor rating especially because they detect about twice as many genes as the other authors do (Table 4) .