Motif Discovery and Phylogenetic Analysis of Hepatitis B Virus Sequences

Abstract

HBV (Hepatitis B Virus) infection is a severe global health problem. In recent years, mutations as an essential element in the HBV evolution have been extensively studied, however, the study of the conserved sequence for the evolution of HBV is still in its infancy. In this paper, we applied MEME (Multiple EM for Motif Elicitation) algorithm for motif discovery and proposed a new metric CI (Conserved Index) to make phylogenetic analysis of HBV sequences. Our results indicate that MEME can efficiently discover multiple motifs from HBV sequences and the new measurement CI for the conservative of sequences can effectively help us to build the phylogenetic tree. Thus, we can get evolutionary relationship of HBV sequence through the phylogenetic tree.