CO-phylum: An Assembly-Free Phylogenomic Approach for Close Related Organisms

TL;DR

CO-phylum is a novel assembly-free phylogenomic method that constructs accurate evolutionary trees directly from raw sequencing data of closely related organisms, addressing speed and evolutionary basis limitations of existing approaches.

Contribution

It introduces CO-phylum, a new method capable of building high-resolution phylogenetic trees directly from unassembled sequencing data, with a near-linear relationship to p-distance.

Findings

Generates high-resolution, accurate phylogenetic trees from raw data

Operates efficiently without genome assembly

Distance correlates almost linearly with p-distance

Abstract

Phylogenomic approaches developed thus far are either too time-consuming or lack a solid evolutionary basis. Moreover, no phylogenomic approach is capable of constructing a tree directly from unassembled raw sequencing data. A new phylogenomic method, CO-phylum, is developed to alleviate these flaws. CO-phylum can generate a high-resolution and highly accurate tree using complete genome or unassembled sequencing data of close related organisms, in addition, CO-phylum distance is almost linear with p-distance.