Prokaryotic phylogenies inferred from continuous orthologous genes

摘要

The phylogeny is a method used to represent the evolutionary relationship among various groups of species. With the increasing availability of whole genome datasets, it is becoming possible to infer organism phylogenies by orthologous gene data. The COGs (Clusters of Orthologous Groups) comprise a framework for the analysis of evolutionary and functional relationships among homologous genes from multiple genomes. In this paper, a novel prokaryotic phylogenies inferring model is proposed which is based on orthologous genes between each genome pair. Firstly, orthologous genes are measured from COGs. Secondly, the evolutionary distance between two genomes is calculated by the number of orthologous genes which are continuous. Finally, a neighbor joining method is used to construct the phylogenetic tree. The proposed method is examined on different datasets from 398 prokaryotic genomes and achieves average accuracy above 90% agreement with Bergey's taxonomy in quartet topologies. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for phylogenetic analysis.