Title: Coronavirus phylogeny based on Base-Base Correlation

Authors: Zhi-Hua Liu, Xiao Sun

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, PR China; Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, 44 Binney St., Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA; Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. ' State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, PR China

Abstract: With more and more complete genome sequences having been released, phylogenetic analysis is entering a new era – that of phylogenomics. In this paper, a novel phylogenomic method, named as Base-Base Correlation (BBC), has been proposed to infer phylogenetic relationships from complete genomes, with particular emphasis on coronavirus phylogeny. Following the high-profile publicity of SARS outbreaks, a renewed interest in coronavirus has been promoted and two novel human coronaviruses (NL63 and HKU1) have been identified. Coronavirus phylogenomics based on BBC is well consistent with that of previous studies. BBC, to study genome information structure based on information theory, provides a novel alignment-free phylogenomic methodology in postgenome informatics.

Keywords: base-base correlation; BBC; phylogenomics; genome information structure; coronavirus phylogeny; SARS; NL63; HKU1; bioinformatics; genome sequences; postgenome informatics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2008.018347

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2008 Vol.4 No.2, pp.211 - 220

Published online: 17 May 2008 *

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