Prokaryotic phylogeny based on complete genomes without sequence alignment

We present a brief review of a series of on-going work on bacterial phylogeny. We propose a new method to infer relatedness of prokaryotes from their complete genome data without using sequence alignment, leading to results comparable with the bacteriologists' systematics as reflected in the latest 2001 edition of Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology.(1) We only touch on the mathematical aspects of the method. The biological implications of our results will be published elsewhere.