Information-Theory Analysis for Key Sites of 16S rDNA Sequence

Abstract:

16S rDNAs carry significant species-specific genetic information,but species identification is not straight forward because the sequence identity varies greatly for different species.In this manuscript,we analyze the key sites that are well conserved within species but significantly varied between species using an information theoretic approach.The method proposed by us was just using the sites(key sites) which contained more genetic information than that of the normal sites of the sequences,to classify the bacterium rather than using the overall sequence.Only a few sites of the whole sequences are responsible for the classification of species.The results presented here demonstrated that key-sites based similarity measures have much better statistical characteristics than that of the traditional overall sequence identity scores