Enhancing Phylogenetic Analysis: A New Genome Sequence Comparison Approach Using Bray-Curtis Dissimilarity Metric

In the pursuit of understanding the evolutionary connections among various species, researchers face a pressing need to develop innovative techniques. This study introduces a new alignment free approach for genome sequence comparison across different species by employing an appropriate distance metric. Specifically, genome sequences consisting of nucleotides (A, G, C, T) are represented in four dimensions using the cumulative sum of suitable numerical values. Afterward, four component descriptors are computed based on the mean of the defined values. Next different distance measures are used to populate the distance matrix utilizing the Bray-Curtis dissimilarity metrics. Phylogenetic trees are subsequently constructed using the UPGMA clustering method and applied to a benchmark dataset of beta-globin genes of 11 species to validate the proposed approach. The performance of the Bray-Curtis metric is then compared with traditional distance metrics, namely the Euclidean, Manhattan, and Canberra methods. The findings indicate that in most cases, the Bray-Curtis metric yields more accurate results, highlighting its potential for advancing phylogenetic studies. Lastly, the interpretations are also made from phylogenetic tree using a new type of metric, which has not yet been used in comparison of genome sequences.