English

Information-theoretic signatures of biodiversity in the barcoding gene

Populations and Evolution 2018-05-16 v1

Abstract

The COI mitochondrial gene is present in all animal phyla and in a few others, and is the leading candidate for species identification through DNA barcoding. Calculating a generalized form of total correlation on publicly available data on the gene yields distinctive information-theoretic descriptors of the phyla represented in the data. Moreover, performing principal component analysis on standardized versions of these descriptors reveals a strong correlation between the first principal component and the natural logarithm of the number of known living species. The descriptors thus constitute clear information-theoretic signatures of the processes whereby evolution has given rise to current biodiversity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.09817,
  title  = {Information-theoretic signatures of biodiversity in the barcoding gene},
  author = {Valmir C. Barbosa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.09817},
  year   = {2018}
}