The GC Skew Index: A Measure of Genomic Compositional Asymmetry and the Degree of Replicational Selection

The GC Skew Index: A Measure of Genomic Compositional Asymmetry and the Degree of Replicational Selection

Circular bacterial chromosomes have highly polarized nucleotide composition in the two replichores, and this genomic strand asymmetry can be visualized using GC skew graphs. Here we propose and discuss the GC skew index (GCSI) for the quantification of genomic compositional skew, which combines a no...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Masaru Tomita, Kazuharu Arakawa
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SAGE Publishing 2007-01-01
Series:Evolutionary Bioinformatics
Subjects:
GC skew
DNA replication
replicational selection
fast Fourier transforms
bioinformatics
GCSI
Online Access:http://la-press.com/article.php?article_id=349
Description
Summary:Circular bacterial chromosomes have highly polarized nucleotide composition in the two replichores, and this genomic strand asymmetry can be visualized using GC skew graphs. Here we propose and discuss the GC skew index (GCSI) for the quantification of genomic compositional skew, which combines a normalized measure of fast Fourier transform to capture the shape of the skew graph and Euclidean distance between the two vertices in a cumulative skew graph to represent the degree of skew. We calculated GCSI for all available bacterial genomes, and GCSI correlated well with the visibility of GC skew. This novel index is useful for estimating confi dence levels for the prediction of replication origin and terminus by methods based on GC skew and for measuring the strength of replicational selection in a genome.
ISSN:1176-9343

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