Measuring genome conservation across taxa: divided strains and united kingdoms.

ABSTRACT: Species evolutionary relationships have traditionally been defined by sequence similarities of phylogenetic marker molecules, recently followed by whole-genome phylogenies based on gene order, average ortholog similarity or gene content. Here, we introduce genome conservation--a novel metric of evolutionary distances between species that simultaneously takes into account, both gene content and sequence similarity at the whole-genome level. Genome conservation represents a robust distance measure, as demonstrated by accurate phylogenetic reconstructions. The genome conservation matrix for all presently sequenced organisms exhibits a remarkable ability to define evolutionary relationships across all taxonomic ranges. An assessment of taxonomic ranks with genome conservation shows that certai

SUBMITTER: Kunin V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC548337 | biostudies-literature | 2005

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature