Genome-To-Genome Distance Calculator

About

The pragmatic species concept for Bacteria and Archaea is ultimately based on DNA-DNA hybridization (DDH). While enabling the taxonomist, in principle, to obtain an estimate of the overall similarity between the genomes of two strains, this technique is tedious and error-prone and cannot be used to incrementally built up a comparative database. Recent technological progress in the area of genome sequencing calls for bioinformatics methods to replace the wet-lab DDH by in-silico genome-to-genome comparison.

This web service offers state-of-the-art methods for inferring whole-genome distances which are well able to mimic DDH. These distance functions can also cope with heavily reduced genomes and repetitive sequence regions. Some of them are also very robust against missing fractions of genomic information (due to incomplete genome sequencing). Our digitally derived genome-to-genome distances show a better correlation with 16S rRNA gene sequence distances than DDH values. Thus, this web service can be used for genome-based species delineation.