Soft Topographic Maps for Clustering and Classifying Bacteria Using Housekeeping Genes

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm is widely used for building topographic maps of data represented in a vectorial space, but it does not operate with dissimilarity data. Soft Topographic Map (STM) algorithm is an extension of SOM to arbitrary distance measures, and it creates a map using a set of units, organized in a rectangular lattice, defining data neighbourhood relationships. In the last years, a new standard for identifying bacteria using genotypic information began to be developed. In this new approach, phylogenetic relationships of bacteria could be determined by comparing a stable part of the bacteria genetic code, the so-called “housekeeping genes.” The goal of this work is to build a topographic representation of bacteria clusters, by means of self-organizing maps, starting from genotypic features regarding housekeeping genes.