Fig 5. Distances estimated by the alignment-free programs Mash [9], Skmer [37], Slope-Spam (this paper) and Spaced [40] between semi-artificial sequences consisting of 252 homologous genes from 19 strains of Wolbachia, embedded in non-related random sequences.

Ten data sets were generated by adding random sequences of different lengths. The x-axis is the proportion of the homologous sequence within the semi-artificial sequences, the y-axis is the ratio between the distance estimated from the semi-artificial sequences and the distances estimated from the original, homologous gene sequences, see the main text for more details.