New software tool could provide answers to life's most intriguing questions

A University of Waterloo researcher has spearheaded the development of a software tool that can provide conclusive answers to some of the world’s most fascinating questions. 

The tool, which combines supervised machine learning with digital signal processing (ML-DSP), could for the first time make it possible to definitively answer questions such as how many different species exist on Earth and in the oceans. How are existing, newly-discovered, and extinct species related to each other? What are the bacterial origins of human mitochondrial DNA?  Do the DNA of a parasite and its host have a similar genomic signature?