A new distribution vector and its application in genome clustering

Abstract

In this paper we report a novel mathematical method to transform the DNA sequences into the distribution vectors which correspond to points in the sixty dimensional space. Each component of the distribution vector represents the distribution of one kind of nucleotide in k segments of the DNA sequences. The mathematical and statistical properties of the distribution vectors are demonstrated and examined with huge datasets of human DNA sequences and random sequences. The determined expectation and standard deviation can make the mapping stable and practicable. Moreover, we apply the distribution vectors to the clustering of the Haemagglutinin (HA) gene of 60 H1N1 viruses from Human, Swine and Avian, the complete mitochondrial genomes from 80 placental mammals and the complete genomes from 50 bacteria. The 60 H1N1 viruses, 80 placental mammals and 50 bacteria are classified accurately and rapidly compared to the multiple sequence alignment methods. The results indicate that the distribution vectors can reveal the similarity and evolutionary relationship among homologous DNA sequences based on the distances between any two of these distribution vectors. The advantage of fast computation offers the distribution vectors the opportunity to deal with a huge amount of DNA sequences efficiently.