# Alignment- and reference-free phylogenomics with colored de-Bruijn graphs

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel alignment- and reference-free phylogenomic method using colored de-Bruijn graphs, enabling large-scale genome-based phylogeny inference with high accuracy and efficiency.

## Contribution

It presents a new approach that constructs colored de-Bruijn graphs to infer phylogenies without pairwise alignments or references, improving robustness and performance.

## Key findings

- Comparable or higher accuracy than existing methods
- Demonstrates robustness across diverse datasets
- Efficient large-scale genome analysis

## Abstract

We present a new whole-genome based approach to infer large-scale phylogenies that is alignment- and reference-free. In contrast to other methods, it does not rely on pairwise comparisons to determine distances to infer edges in a tree. Instead, a colored de-Bruijn graph is constructed, and information on common subsequences is extracted to infer phylogenetic splits. Application to different datasets confirms robustness of the approach. A comparison to other state-of-the-art whole-genome based methods indicates comparable or higher accuracy and efficiency.