• Top
• Poster presentation

This article is part of the supplement: BioSysBio 2007: Systems Biology, Bioinformatics, Synthetic Biology .

Poster presentation

Chaos game representation of mitochondrial DNA: is it useful in phylogenetic studies?

Iman Tavassoly¹ , Omid Tavassoly² and Mohammad Soltany Rezaee Rad³

¹Bioinformatics and Biomathematics Unit, Students Researches Centre, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Sary, Iran

²Department of clinical Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

³Sary School of Pharmacy, Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Sary, Iran

author email corresponding author email

from BioSysBio 2007: Systems Biology, Bioinformatics and Synthetic Biology
Manchester, UK. 11–13 January 2007

BMC Systems Biology 2007, 1(Suppl 1):P35doi:10.1186/1752-0509-1-S1-P35

The electronic version of this abstract is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1752-0509/1?issue=S1

Published:

8 May 2007

© 2007 Tavassoly et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

Poster presentation

Chaos Game Representation (CGR) is an iterative mapping method which can convert a nucleotide sequence to a unique and scale-independent image. There are some studies indicating different applications of CGR images of nucleotide sequences but there is still limited information on their possible application in phylogenetics. In this study we have tried to have an evolutionary evaluation of CGR images of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in different species using different image processing tools. In this study the algorithm of chaos game for four points as four bases in nucleotide sequences were coded in Matlab 7.0 language licensed by the Mathworks Inc. http://www.mathworks.com webcite. We produced CGR images of complete mtDNA genomes of 15 species. We used different methods of image processing for comparing these images in different species. Our results showed that there is some evolutionary information in CGR images of mtDNA. In CGR images of a DNA sequence both global and local patterns are displayed. These images allow us to investigate patterns in the sequence and help our eye to recognize hidden structures. Our results indicated that CGR images of mtDNA may be useful tools in phylogenetic studies although we need more studies to build a hypothesis about possible applications of these images in molecular evolutionary studies.

Have something to say? Post a comment on this article!