A new measurement of sequence conservation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Understanding sequence conservation is important for the study of sequence evolution and for the identification of functional regions of the genome. Current studies often measure sequence conservation based on every position in contiguous regions. Therefore, a large number of functional regions that contain conserved segments separated by relatively long divergent segments are ignored. Our goal in this paper is to define a new measurement of sequence conservation such that both contiguously conserved regions and discontiguously conserved regions can be detected based on this new measurement. Here and in the following, conserved regions are those regions that share similarity higher than a pre-specified similarity threshold with their homologous regions in other species.

SUBMITTER: Cai X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2807881 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature