DNA vectorgrams: Representation of cancer genes as movements on a 2D cellular lattice

A brief introduction introduction to a computer graphics characterization of cancer DNA sequences, as well as other biologically interesting sequences, is presented. The procedure described takes DNA sequences containing n bases and computes n two-dimensional real vectors. When displayed on a planar unit-cellular lattice, these characteristic patterns appear as a “DNA vectorgram,” C(n). Several demonstration plots are provided which indicate that C(n) is sensitive to certain statistical properties of the sequence of bases and allows the human observer to visually detect some important sequence structural properties and patterns not easily captured by traditional methods. The system presented has as its primary focus the fast characterization of the progression of sequence data using an interactive graphics system with several controlling parameters.