Strings 2008 2 4

Visual comparison of strings

Humans are very good at identifying patterns visually. One of the first ways to compare biological sequences was to generate identity matrices and visualise them in a so called dot plot.

Computing of a dot plot

The two sequences correspond to the two dimensions of the matrix and each matrix element represents the outcome of the comparison between the two corresponding characters in the sequences. Identical character pairings are visualised by a black pixel while different characters are coloured white.

The figure below shows an example of a dot plot comparing two DNA sequencess.

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