Constructing genome phylogenetic tree of large dsDNA viruses using log-correlation distance

The taxonomy of the large dsDNA viruses has been provided in the VIIIth report of ICTV. The phylogenetic tree of large dsDNA viruses has been constructed using CVTree method (Gao and Qi, BMC Evol. Biol.7(2007)41). In this paper, we use the log-correlation distance method analyze the complete genome of the 124 large dsDNA viruses and construct phylogenetic trees based on compositional vectors of DNA sequences or protein sequences. The phylogenetic trees show the large dsDNA virus genomes are separated into nine families. The structures of the trees based on log-correlation distance are mostly consistent with the result of CVTree method and the taxonomy of the VIIIth report of ICTV.