Taxonomics Methods Using DNA

National Library Of Medicine

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Abstract

The project started when Dr. Spouge was invited to analyze data for the 2009 Edinburgh Conference "Selecting Barcode Loci for Plants", a meeting of the Plant Working Group within the Consortium for the Barcode of Life. Later, Dr. Spouge performed a similar data analysis for the Fungal Barcode Working Group in Amsterdam in 2011. Alignment-free comparison of genomes using subsets of short oligonucleotide like minimizers, syncmers, and minimally-overlapping words appear promising in taxonomic and medical classification systems. One aim of the collaboration is to produce objective standards for sequence comparison, with the ultimate aim of improving taxonomic classification using alignment-free methods. Presently, we are developing central limit theorems and other statistics to exact compare subsets of k-mers produced by alignment-free methods of a query and reference sequence. The statistics can detect insertions and deletions relative to the reference sequence and quantify evolutionary distance between the two sequences with an error.