DNA and protein tetragrams: Biological sequences as tetrahedral movements

Abstract

A graphical approach is introduced for representing information-containing sequences in biology. In particular, the procedure takes DNA or protein sequences containing n bases or amino acids, respectively, and computes n three-dimensional real vectors. When displayed on connected tetrahedra these characteristic patterns appear as DNA or amino acid tetragrams T(n). Experiments indicate that these tetragrams are sensitive to certain important patterns in the sequence of bases and allow the human observer to visually detect various properties of biological sequences. The system presented is special in its focus on the fast characterization of the progression of sequence data using a graphics supercomputer with several controlling parameters. © 1992.