RB-finder: an improved distance-based sliding window method to detect recombination breakpoints

J Comput Biol. 2008 Sep;15(7):881-98. doi: 10.1089/cmb.2007.0154.

Abstract

Recombination detection is important before inferring phylogenetic relationships. This will eventually lead to a better understanding of pathogen evolution, more accurate genotyping, and advancements in vaccine development. In this paper, we introduce RB-Finder, a fast and accurate distance-based window method to detect recombination in a multiple sequence alignment. Our method introduces a more informative distance measure and a novel weighting strategy to reduce the window size sensitivity problem and hence improve the accuracy of breakpoint detection. Furthermore, our method is faster than existing phylogeny-based methods since we do not need to construct and compare complex phylogenetic trees. When compared with the current best method Pruned-PDM, our method is a few hundred times more efficient. Experimental evaluation of RB-Finder using synthetic and biological datasets showed that our method is more accurate than existing phylogeny-based methods. We also show how our method has potential use in other related applications such as genotyping.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Base Sequence*
  • Computational Biology / methods
  • Databases, Genetic
  • Genotype
  • HIV-1 / genetics
  • Humans
  • Models, Genetic
  • Molecular Sequence Data
  • Phylogeny
  • Recombination, Genetic*
  • Sequence Alignment / methods*
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA / methods*