Phylogenetic analysis using complete signature information of whole genomes and clustered Neighbour-Joining method

A new method called Complete Composition Vector (CCV), which is a collection of Composition Vectors (CV), is described to infer evolutionary relationships between species using their complete genomic sequences. Such a method bypasses the complexity of performing multiple sequence alignments and avoids the ambiguity of choosing individual genes for species tree construction. It is expected to effectively retain the rich evolutionary information contained in the whole genomic sequence. The method was applied to infer the evolutionary footprints for several datasets that have been previously studied. The final phylogenies were built by an improved clustered Neighbour-Joining method. The generated phylogenetic trees are highly consistent with taxonomy hierarchy and previous studies, with some biologically interesting disagreements.