Information Theoretic Approaches to Whole Genome Phylogenies

David Burstein and Igor Ulitsky (Tel Aviv University)

We describe a novel method for efficient reconstruction of
phylogenetic trees, based on sequences of whole genomes or
proteomes. The core of our proposal is an algorithm for
efficiently computing pairwise distances, based on information
theoretic measures. Our algorithm fast enough to enable constructing
the tree for hundreds of species, and the forest for almost two thousand
viruses. An initial analysis of the results exhibits a remarkable agreement
with the "acceptable phylogenetic truth".
A survey of the known whole-genome reconstruction techniques
will be presented along with their comparable performance with
our method. This analysis shows a significant margin improvement
introduced by our method over the existing approaches.

Joint work with Tamir Tuller and Benny Chor