Entropy of DNA Sequences as Similarity Index for Various SARS-CoV-2 Virus Strains

Biswas, S.; Sarkar, B. K.

In this work, we have described the analysis of digitized sequences of genetic information by means of the notions of entropy. The occurrence of a particular pattern in the genetic sequence is paid special attention. The occurrence of genetic word is expressed in a density manner. The occurrence frequency of the q-gram genetic word of interest is determined with the help of finite impulse response (FIR) type filter along the sequence. It is in turn, used for the determination of horizontal correlations, i.e., correlations between the word along the sequence. We use the probability distribution of the genetic word occurrence as the input for the calculation of entropy in the sequence. The sequence entropy is further used for principal component analysis (PCA) to determine the similarity/dissimilarity between the biological sequences. We have considered seven human corona virus sequences. Entropy-based similarity study for SARS-CoV-2 strains is presented in this paper. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.