The paper briefly reviews the methodology of the symbolic nucleic sequence conversion into genomic signals and presents large scale and global features of the resulting genomic signals. Whole chromosomes or whole genomes are converted into complex signals and phase analysis is performed. The phase, cumulated phase and unwrapped phase of genomic signals are studied as tools for revealing important features of to the first and second order statistics of nucleotide distribution along DNA strands. It is shown that the unwrapped phase displays an almost linear variation along whole chromosomes. The property holds for all the investigated genomes, being shared by both prokaryotes and eukaryotes, while the magnitude and sign of the unwrapped phase slope is specific for each taxon and chromosome. The comparison between the behavior of the cumulated phase and of the unwrapped phase across the putative origins and termini of the replichores suggests a model of the 'patchy' structure of the chromosomes.

Date Published: 13 October 2003
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 5068, Saratov Fall Meeting 2002: Optical Technologies in Biophysics and Medicine IV, (13 October 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.518751

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5068:
Saratov Fall Meeting 2002: Optical Technologies in Biophysics and Medicine IV
Valery V. Tuchin, Editor(s)