Coronavirus phylogeny based on base-base correlation.

Liu, Zhi-Hua; Sun, Xiao

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.