Nonmetric Distances for Barcode of Life

Abstract

Barcode of Life (BOL) project[4] is the project to enable us to recognize species easier. Although it is often troublesome to define what the species are, BOL can define species by simple DNA sequences. When it works, we do not have to consult with any other information than DNA sequences to decide if two individuals belong to the same species or not. If they share same BOL with each other, they belong to the same species undoubtedly. In contrast to this, it is usually difficult to define what the higher clade are. We cannot expect that each individual which belong to the same upper Claude share the same BOL. Instead, we have to find how BOL of individuals which belong to distinct higher clade differ from each other. In this poster, we demonstrate how nonmetric measure of distances between BOL make easier to recognize if each belongs to common higher clade or not. We also show that usual hierarchical clustering like NJ method is not suitable to visualize relationships expressed by nonmetric measure and propose to usage of nonmetric multidimensional scaling (nMDS)[1, 2].