Description
With the advent of inexpensive, quick high throughput sequencing, it is imperative to verify prokaryotic species boundaries with software methods to see if they are discrete. While computational power has become stronger and less expensive over time, currently some biological methods to analyze genomes are slow for a large number of comparisons. Thus, a heuristic software program to examine species boundaries using their respective average nucleotide index was created. This program has been written to output all comparisons from wholly sequenced genomes downloaded from the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Structured Query Language syntax. All genomes that scored over ninety-eight percent were analyzed further with a more accurate but slower classification program, JSpecies Web Average Nucleotide Index with the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. Many differently classified species average nucleotide index scored over ninety-nine percent by both programs. As a result of these findings, specific species should be considered to be reclassified.
