COMPUTATIONAL GENOMIC SIGNATURES AND METAGENOMICS

Mathematical characterizations of biological sequences form one of the main elements of bioinformatics. In this work, a class of DNA sequence characterization, namely computational genomics signatures, which capture global features of these sequences is used to address emerging computational biology challenges. Because of the species specificity and pervasiveness of genome signatures, it is possible to use these signatures to characterize and identify a genome or a taxonomic unit using a short genome fragment from that source. However, the identification accuracy is generally poor when the sequence model and the sequence distance measure are not selected carefully. We show that the use of relative distance measures instead of absolute metrics makes it possible to obtain better detection accuracy. Furthermore, the use of relative metrics can create opportunities for using more complex models to develop genome signatures, which cannot be used efficiently when conventional distance measures are used