A new vector for identification of prokaryotes and their variable-size genomes.

A large number of prokaryotes have been produced, so how to provide a means to describe and distinguish them accurately is becoming a key issue of prokaryotic taxonomy. We proposed an efficient algorithm to filter out most genome fragments that are horizontally transferred, and extracted a new genome vector (GV). To highlight the power of GV, we applied it to identify prokaryotes and their variable-size genome fragments. The result indicated that the new vector as species tags can accurately identify genome fragments as short as 3,000 bp at species level.