Methodology article

Chaos game representation for comparison of whole genomes

Jijoy Joseph and Roschen Sasikumar^*

• * Corresponding author: Roschen Sasikumar roschen.csir@gmail.com

Author Affiliations

Computational Modelling and Simulation, Regional Research Laboratory (CSIR), Thiruvananthapuram, 695019, India

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BMC Bioinformatics 2006, 7:243 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-7-243

Published: 5 May 2006

Abstract

Background

Chaos game representation of genome sequences has been used for visual representation of genome sequence patterns as well as alignment-free comparisons of sequences based on oligonucleotide frequencies. However the potential of this representation for making alignment-based comparisons of whole genome sequences has not been exploited.

Results

We present here a fast algorithm for identifying all local alignments between two long DNA sequences using the sequence information contained in CGR points. The local alignments can be depicted graphically in a dot-matrix plot or in text form, and the significant similarities and differences between the two sequences can be identified. We demonstrate the method through comparison of whole genomes of several microbial species. Given two closely related genomes we generate information on mismatches, insertions, deletions and shuffles that differentiate the two genomes.

Conclusion

Addition of the possibility of large scale sequence alignment to the repertoire of alignment-free sequence analysis applications of chaos game representation, positions CGR as a powerful sequence analysis tool.