Graphical Representation of Biological Sequences

Abstract

Sequence comparison is one of the most fundamental tasks in bioinformatics. For biolog- ical sequence comparison, alignment is the most profitable method when the sequence lengths are not so large. However, as the time complexity of the alignment is the square order of the sequence length, the alignment requires a large amount of computational time for comparison of sequences of large size. Therefore, so-called alignment-free sequence comparison methods are needed for comparison between such as whole genome sequences in practical time. In this chapter, we reviewed the graphical representation of biological sequences, which is one of the major alignment-free sequence comparison methods. The notable effects of weighting during the course of the graphical representa- tion introduced first by the author and co-workers were also mentioned.