DUC-Curve, a highly compact 2D graphical representation of DNA sequences and its application in sequence alignment

A highly compact and simple 2D graphical representation of DNA sequences, named DUC-Curve, is constructed through mapping four nucleotides to a unit circle with a cyclic order. DUC-Curve could directly detect nucleotide, di-nucleotide compositions and microsatellite structure from DNA sequences. Moreover, it also could be used for DNA sequence alignment. Taking geometric center vectors of DUC-Curves as sequence descriptor, we perform similarity analysis on the first exons of β-globin genes of 11 species, oncogene TP53 of 27 species and twenty-four Influenza A viruses, respectively. The obtained reasonable results illustrate that the proposed method is very effective in sequence comparison problems, and will at least play a complementary role in classification and clustering problems.