On Measuring the Dissimilarity between Biological Sequences

Abstract

The antimicrobial resistance (AMR) of bacteria to antibiotics is tightly connected with their genetic structure changes. Many methods belonging to various disciplines are applied to analyze these genetic changes. The genes involved in AMR undergo different changes. These changes can be analyzed using distances between different variants (alleles) of a gene. This paper aims to study the dissimilarity between different variants of the sul2 gene using the Levenshtein distance between the corresponding DNA sequences, a distance based on binary representation and the distance induces by the global alignment scores computed using with the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm.