Prokaryotic Phylogeny Based on Complete Genomes Without Sequence Alignment

This is a brief review of a series of on-going work on bacterial phylogeny. We have proposed a new method to infer relatedness of prokaryotes from their complete genome data without using sequence alignment. It has led to results comparable with the bacteriologists' systematics as reflected in the latest 2001 edition of the Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology¹. In what follows we only touch on the mathematical aspects of the method. The biological implications of our results will be published elsewhere.