Whole-genome based Archaea phylogeny and taxonomy: A composition vector approach

The newly proposed alignment-free and parameter-free composition vector (CVtree) method has been successfully applied to infer phylogenetic relationship of viruses, chloroplasts, bacteria, and fungi from their whole-genome data. In this study we pay special attention to the phylogenetic positions of 56 Archaea genomes among which 7 species have not been listed either in Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology or in Taxonomic Outline of Bacteria and Archaea (TOBA). By inspecting the stable monophyletic branchings in CVTrees reconstructed from a total of 861 genomes (56 Archaea plus 797 Bacteria, using 8 Eukarya as outgroups) definite taxonomic assignments were proposed for these not-fully-classified species. Further development of Archaea taxonomy may verify the predicted phylogenetic results of the CVTree approach.