Towards a taxonomic coherence between average nucleotide identity and 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity for species demarcation of prokaryotes

Among available genome relatedness indices, average nucleotide identity (ANI) is one of the most robust measurements of genomic relatedness between strains, and has great potential in the taxonomy of bacteria and archaea as a substitute for the labour-intensive DNA-DNA hybridization (DDH) technique. An ANI threshold range (95-96%) for species demarcation had previously been suggested based on comparative investigation between DDH and ANI values, albeit with rather limited datasets. Furthermore, its generality was not tested on all lineages of prokaryotes. Here, we investigated the overall distribution of ANI values generated by pairwise comparison of 6787 genomes of prokaryotes belonging to 22 phyla to see…

• NR
  National Research Foundation
• NR
  National Research Foundation of Korea

  Awards: 2012M3A9D1054622, 2013-035122