Histogram-based DNA analysis for the visualization of chromosome, genome and species information

Abstract

Motivation: We describe a novel approach to explore DNA nucleotide sequence data, aiming to produce high-level categorical and structural information about the underlying chromosomes, genomes and species. Results: The article starts by analyzing chromosomal data through histograms using fixed length DNA sequences. After creating the DNA-related histograms, a correlation between pairs of histograms is computed, producing a global correlation matrix. These data are then used as input to several data processing methods for information extraction and tabular/graphical output generation. A set of 18 species is processed and the extensive results reveal that the proposed method is able to generate significant and diversified outputs, in good accordance with current scientific knowledge in domains such as genomics and phylogenetics. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press.