In: Biology
What is skewed gc content what what do we use it for?
It is an application for computing and plotting nucleotide skew data.
The software GenSkew computes the normal and the cumulative skew of two selectable nucleotides for a given sequence. The result is displayed in two different graphs. The user can choose the pair of nucleotides the skew should be calculated for. In such a skew the relation of the nucleotides is given by a formula. The particular values are computed by the formula:
Skew = (nucleotide1 - nucleotide2) / (nucleotide1 + nucleotide2)
For the computation the genome is separated into parts, socalled windows. For every window the value of the skew is calculated with the formula. The normal graph displays every single value related to the particular position in sequence. The cumulative graph adds up the values for all previous windows up to the certain position. The windows are shifted along the sequence by a certain stepsize. To improve the result the stepsize can be reduced.
The global minimum and maximum are displayed in the cumulative graph. The minimum and maximum of a GC-skew can be used to predict the origin of replication (minimum) and the terminus location (maximum) in prokaryotic genomes.