COVID-19 Genome Analysis Using Alignment-Free Methods

Nawaz, M. S.; Fournier-Viger, P.; Niu, X.; Wu, Y.; Lin, J. C. W.

Examining the genome sequences of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) strains is critical to properly understand this disease and its functionalities. In bioinformatics, alignment-free (AF) sequence analysis methods offer a natural framework to investigate and understand the patterns and inherent properties of biological sequences. Thus, AF methods are used in this paper for the analysis and comparison of COVID-19 genome sequences. First, frequent patterns of nucleotide base(s) in COVID-19 genome sequences are extracted. Second, the similarity/dissimilarity between COVID-19 genome sequences are measured with different AF methods. This allows to compare sequences and evaluate the performance of various distance measures employed in AF methods. Lastly, the phylogeny for the COVID-19 genome sequences are constructed with various AF methods as well as the consensus tree that shows the level of support (agreement) among phylogenetic trees built by various AF methods. Obtained results show that AF methods can be used efficiently for the analysis of COVID-19 genome sequences. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.