Abstract:

Palindromes are symmetrical words of DNA in the sense that it reads exactly the same as its reverse complementary sequence. Computer analysis revealed unusual clusters of palindromes in a segment of the human cytomegalovirus genome. And experimental assays then confirmed that the segment contained an origin of replication for the virus. We provide a Poisson process approximation for the occurrences of palindromes in the DNA genome via the Chen-Stein method, providing the basis for the use of scan-statistic in the analysis of clusters of palindromes. And subsequently, Poisson approximation is described how to establish asymptotic and approximate distributions of the scan statistics.