Li-Qian Zhou

Phylogeny of prokaryotes and chloroplasts revealed by a simple composition approach on all protein sequences from complete genomes without sequence alignment.

The complete genomes of living organisms have provided much information on their phylogenetic relationships. Similarly, the complete genomes of chloroplasts have helped to resolve the evolution of this organelle in photosynthetic eukaryotes. In this paper we propose an alternative method of phylogenetic analysis using compositional statistics for all protein sequences from complete genomes. This new method is conceptually simpler than and computationally as fast as the one proposed by Qi et al. (2004b) and Chu et al. (2004). The same data sets used in Qi et al. (2004b) and Chu et al. (2004) are analyzed using the new method. Our distance-based phylogenic tree of the 109 prokaryotes and eukaryotes agrees with the biologists “tree of life” based on 16S rRNA comparison in a predominant majority of basic branching and most lower taxa. Our phylogenetic analysis also shows that the chloroplast genomes are separated to two major clades corresponding to chlorophytes s.l. and rhodophytes s.l. The interrelationships among the chloroplasts are largely in agreement with the current understanding on chloroplast evolution.

Whole-proteome phylogeny of large dsDNA viruses and parvoviruses through a composition vector method related to dynamical language model

BackgroundThe vast sequence divergence among different virus groups has presented a great challenge to alignment-based analysis of virus phylogeny. Due to the problems caused by the uncertainty in alignment, existing tools for phylogenetic analysis based on multiple alignment could not be directly applied to the whole-genome comparison and phylogenomic studies of viruses. There has been a growing interest in alignment-free methods for phylogenetic analysis using complete genome data. Among the alignment-free methods, a dynamical language (DL) method proposed by our group has successfully been applied to the phylogenetic analysis of bacteria and chloroplast genomes.ResultsIn this paper, the DL method is used to analyze the whole-proteome phylogeny of 124 large dsDNA viruses and 30 parvoviruses, two data sets with large difference in genome size. The trees from our analyses are in good agreement to the latest classification of large dsDNA viruses and parvoviruses by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV).ConclusionsThe present method provides a new way for recovering the phylogeny of large dsDNA viruses and parvoviruses, and also some insights on the affiliation of a number of unclassified viruses. In comparison, some alignment-free methods such as the CV Tree method can be used for recovering the phylogeny of large dsDNA viruses, but they are not suitable for resolving the phylogeny of parvoviruses with a much smaller genome size.

Human Pol II promoter recognition based on primary sequences and free energy of dinucleotides

BackgroundPromoter region plays an important role in determining where the transcription of a particular gene should be initiated. Computational prediction of eukaryotic Pol II promoter sequences is one of the most significant problems in sequence analysis. Existing promoter prediction methods are still far from being satisfactory.ResultsWe attempt to recognize the human Pol II promoter sequences from the non-promoter sequences which are made up of exon and intron sequences. Four methods are used: two kinds of multifractal analysis performed on the numeric sequences obtained from the dinucleotide free energy, Z curve analysis and global descriptor of the promoter/non-promoter primary sequences. A total of 141 parameters are extracted from these methods and categorized into seven groups (methods). They are used to generate certain spaces and then each promoter/non-promoter sequence is represented by a point in the corresponding space. All the 120 possible combinations of the seven methods are tested. Based on Fishers linear discriminant algorithm, with a relatively smaller number of parameters (96 and 117), we get satisfactory discriminant accuracies. Particularly, in the case of 117 parameters, the accuracies for the training and test sets reach 90.43% and 89.79%, respectively. A comparison with five other existing methods indicates that our methods have a better performance. Using the global descriptor method (36 parameters), 17 of the 18 experimentally verified promoter sequences of human chromosome 22 are correctly identified.ConclusionThe high accuracies achieved suggest that the methods of this paper are useful for understanding the difficult problem of promoter prediction.

A Mutual Information Based Sequence Distance For Vertebrate Phylogeny Using Complete Mitochondrial Genomes

Traditional sequence distances require alignment. A new mutual information based sequence distance without alignment is defined in this paper. This distance is based on compositional vectors of DNA sequences or protein sequences from complete genomes. First we establish the mathematical foundation of this distance. Then this distance is applied to analyze the phylogenetic relationship of 64 vertebrates using complete mitochondrial genomes. The phylogenetic tree shows that the mitochondrial genomes are separated into three major groups. One group corresponds to mammals; one group corresponds to fish; and the last one is Archosauria (including birds and reptiles). The structure of the tree based on our new distance is roughly in agreement in topology with the current known phylogenies of vertebrates.

Phylogenetic analysis of Polyomaviruses Based on Their Complete Genomes

Perez-Losada et al. [1] analyzed 72 complete genomes corresponding to nine mammalian (67 strains) and 2 avian (5 strains) polyomavirus species using maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods of phylogenetic inference. Because some data of 2 genomes in their work are now not available in GenBank, in this work, we analyze the phylogenetic relationship of the remaining 70 complete genomes corresponding to nine mammalian (65 strains) and two avian (5 strains) polyomavirus species using a dynamical language model approach developed by our group (Yu et al., [26]). This distance method does not require sequence alignment for deriving species phylogeny based on overall similarities of the complete genomes. Our best tree separates the bird polyomaviruses (avian polyomaviruses and goose hemorrhagic polymaviruses) from the mammalian polyomaviruses, which supports the idea of splitting the genus into two subgenera. Such a split is consistent with the different viral life strategies of each group. In the mammalian polyomavirus subgenera, mouse polyomaviruses (MPV), simian viruses 40 (SV40), BK viruses (BKV) and JC viruses (JCV) are grouped as different branches as expected. The topology of our best tree is quite similar to that of the tree constructed by Perez-Losada et al.

Some comparison on whole-proteome phylogeny of large dsDNA viruses based on dynamical language approach and feature frequency profiles method

There has been a growing interest in alignment-free methods for phylogenetic analysis using complete genome data. Among them, CVTree method, feature frequency profiles method and dynamical language approach were used to investigate the whole-proteome phylogeny of large dsDNA viruses. Using the data set of large dsDNA viruses from Gao and Qi (BMC Evol. Biol. 2007), the phylogenetic results based on the CVTree method and the dynamical language approach were compared in Yu et al. (BMC Evol. Biol. 2010). In this paper, we first apply dynamical language approach to the data set of large dsDNA viruses from Wu et al. (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2009) and compare our phylogenetic results with those based on the feature frequency profiles method. Then we construct the whole-proteome phylogeny of the larger dataset combining the above two data sets. According to the report of The International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), the trees from our analyses are in good agreement to the latest classification of large dsDNA viruses.