On detection and assessment of statistical significance of Genomic Islands.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Many of the available methods for detecting Genomic Islands (GIs) in prokaryotic genomes use markers such as transposons, proximal tRNAs, flanking repeats etc., or they use other supervised techniques requiring training datasets. Most of these methods are primarily based on the biases in GC content or codon and amino acid usage of the islands. However, these methods either do not use any formal statistical test of significance or use statistical tests for which the critical values and the P-values are not adequately justified. We propose a method, which is unsupervised in nature and uses Monte-Carlo statistical tests based on randomly selected segments of a chromosome. Such tests are supported by precise statistical distribution theory, and consequently, the resulting P-

SUBMITTER: Chatterjee R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2362129 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature