Host–parasite relations of bacteria and phages can be unveiled by Oligostickiness, a measure of relaxed sequence similarity

The recent metagenome analysis has been producing a large number of host-unassigned viruses. Although assigning viruses to their hosts is basically important not only for virology but also for prevention of epidemic, it has been a laborious and difficult task to date. The only effective method for this purpose has been to find them in a same microscopic view. Now, we tried a computational approach based on genome sequences of bacteria and phages, introducing a physicochemical parameter, SOSS (set of oligostickiness similarity score) derived from oligostickiness, a measure of binding affinity of oligonucleotides to template DNA.