A New Approach for DNA Sequence Similarity Analysis based on Triplets of Nucleic Acid Bases

Abstract

Similarity analysis of DNA sequences is a fundamental research area in Bioinformatics. The characteristic distribution of L-tuple, which is the tuple of length L, reflects the valuable information contained in a biological sequence and thus may be used in DNA sequence similarity analysis. However, similarity analysis based on characteristic distribution of L-tuple is not effective for the comparison of highly conservative sequences. In this paper, a new similarity measurement approach based on Triplets of Nucleic Acid Bases (TNAB) is introduced for DNA sequence similarity analysis. The new approach characterizes both the content feature and position feature of a DNA sequence using the frequency and position of occurrence of TNAB in the sequence. The experimental results show that the approach based on TNAB is effective for analysing DNA sequence similarity.