Computer visualization of long genomic sequences

Human beings find it difficult to analyze local and global oligonucleotide patterns in the linear primary sequences of a genome. In this paper, we present a family of iterated function systems (IFS) that can be used to generate a set of visual models of a DNA sequence. A new visualization function, the W-curve, that is derived from this IFS family is introduced. Using W-curves, a user can readily compare subsequences within a long genomic sequence --- or between genomic sequences --- and can visually evaluate the effect of local variations (mutations) upon the global genomic information content.