A PROGRAM FOR ANALYZING MICROBIAL BINARY CHARACTERISTICS

A program for tabulating the occurrence of binary (yes/no) character s tates (i.e. features) according to their frequency of occurrence withi n a set of strains or any subgroup of this set is described. The progr am, called FREAK, runs under the MS DOS operating system and produces the following information. A list of the code designations of strains in each group. A table giving the positive, negative and missing count s of each character for all (overall) strains and each group of strain s. A table of the percentage of strains, overall and in each group, wh ich have positive characteristics. A table giving the level of uniquen ess of a character for each group and a table giving the group partiti oning index, GPI, (Walczak & Krichevsky, 1982). A table of the hypothe tical modal organism (HMO) for each group. A list of the similarity of each strain to the overall HMO and the group HMO using either the sim ple matching coefficient (Sm) or the Jaccard coefficient (Sj), strains are listed in unsorted and sorted order. The taxon radius and vigour are calculated for each group. A probabilistic matrix can be created f rom the data and may be output in either Micro-IS format (Ponyrata & K richevsky, 1992) or a general format used by other programs (Bryant, 1 991).