Analyzing Multi-locus Plant Barcoding Datasets with a Composition Vector Method Based on Adjustable Weighted Distance

The composition vector (CV) method has been proved to be a reliable and fast alignment-free method to analyze large COI barcoding data. In this study, we modify this method for analyzing multi-gene datasets for plant DNA barcoding. The modified method includes an adjustable-weighted algorithm for the vector distance according to the ratio in sequence length of the candidate genes for each pair of taxa. dataset, the CV approach outperformed the traditional approach by 16.7%.