BioSysBio:abstracts/2007/Iman Tavassoly


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= Chaos Game Representation of Mitochondrial DNA: Is it useful in phylogenetic studies? =

Author(s): Iman Tavassoly, Omid Tavassoly, Mohammad Soltany Rezaee Rad Affiliations: Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences and Tarbiat Modares University, IRAN Contact:iman_tavassoly@hotmail.com Keywords: chaos game representation, mtDNA, evolution

Background/Introduction
Chaos Game Representation (CGR) is an iterative mapping method which can convert a nucleotide sequence to a unique and scale-independent image. There are some studies indicating different applications of CGR images of nucleotide sequences but there is still limited information on their possible application in phylogenetics. In this study we have tried to have a evolutionary evaluation of CGR images of mtDNA in different species using different image processing tools.

Results
Our results showed that there are some evolutionary information in CGR images of mtDNA.

Images/Tables
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Materials/Methods
The algorithms of chaos game for four points as four bases in nucleotide sequences were coded in Matlab 7.0 language licensed by the Mathworks Inc. (http://www.mathworks.com). We produced CGR images of complete mtDNA genomes of 15 species. We used different methods of image processing for comparing these images in different species.

Conclusion
In CGR images of a DNA sequence both global and local patterns are displayed. These images allow us to investigate patterns in the sequence and help our eye to recognize hidden structures. Our results indicated that CGR images of mtDNAs may be useful tools in phylogenetic studies although we need more studies to build a hypothesis about possible applications of these images in molecular evolutionary studies.