Alignment-free Visualization of Metagenomic Data by Genomic Signal Processing

Abstract

Alignment-free visualization of metagenomic data without prior knowledge about organism composition is one of the major issues in metagenomic bioinformatics. Such a visualization method must place fragments from one organism in close proximity to each other, be reproducible and with rapidly increasing amount of data also work ideally in linear time. A novel technique fulfilling all of these requirements is introduced in this paper. The method is based on transformation of genomic sequence into phase signal representation with extraction of three Hjorth’s descriptors forming three dimensional space for visualization.