Exploration of Natural Alignment Scoring Rules and Clustering Thresholds for Bacterial Core/Pan Genome Analysis

Abstract

Bacterial adaptation through gene loss and acquisition are the fundamental mechanisms that determine the structure of the core and pan genomes. One of the challenges in identifying homologous genes required for the description of core and pan genomes is the absence of appropriate alignment scoring rules and clustering thresholds. In this work, we present new methods to establish appropriate alignment scoring rules and clustering thresholds.