Dynamical Visualization of the Dna Sequence and Its Nucleotide Content

Visual inspection can help reveal patterns that would be computationally rather difficult to reveal. We present a program to visualize a DNA sequence and its nucleotide content. The program visualizes either the whole of a given sequence, or specified fragments. It also provides facilities to compare visualizations obtained for different sequences. The program uses three different algorithms for visualizations: track-based, fractal-based and visualization based on the entropy-like parameters calculated using a sliding window. Track-based visualization considers the sequence symbol-by-symbol; the other two methods also take into account also how well nucleotides are ”mixed” in the sequence. It allows an easy revealing of the repeated patterns, segments with a low content of some nucleotides, etc. Current version of the program works under Microsoft Windows.