A grammar-based distance metric enables fast and accurate clustering of large sets of 16S sequences

David J. Russell, Samuel F. Way, Andrew K. Benson, Khalid Sayood

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

36 Scopus citations

Abstract

Background: We propose a sequence clustering algorithm and compare the partition quality and execution time of the proposed algorithm with those of a popular existing algorithm. The proposed clustering algorithm uses a grammar-based distance metric to determine partitioning for a set of biological sequences. The algorithm performs clustering in which new sequences are compared with cluster-representative sequences to determine membership. If comparison fails to identify a suitable cluster, a new cluster is created.Results: The performance of the proposed algorithm is validated via comparison to the popular DNA/RNA sequence clustering approach, CD-HIT-EST, and to the recently developed algorithm, UCLUST, using two different sets of 16S rDNA sequences from 2,255 genera. The proposed algorithm maintains a comparable CPU execution time with that of CD-HIT-EST which is much slower than UCLUST, and has successfully generated clusters with higher statistical accuracy than both CD-HIT-EST and UCLUST. The validation results are especially striking for large datasets.Conclusions: We introduce a fast and accurate clustering algorithm that relies on a grammar-based sequence distance. Its statistical clustering quality is validated by clustering large datasets containing 16S rDNA sequences.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number601
JournalBMC bioinformatics
Volume11
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 17 2010

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Structural Biology
  • Biochemistry
  • Molecular Biology
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Applied Mathematics

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