Genome Biology

official impact factor 6.89

Open Access Method

Assignment of isochores for all completely sequenced vertebrate genomes using a consensus

Thorsten Schmidt1 and Dmitrij Frishman1,2*

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Genome-Oriented Bioinformatics, Wissenschaftszentrum Weihenstephan, Technische Universität München, D-85350 Freising, Germany

2 Institute for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (MIPS), Helmholtz Zentrum München - German Research Center for Environmental Health (GmbH), Ingolstädter Landstraße, D-85764 Neuherberg, Germany

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Genome Biology 2008, 9:R104 doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-6-r104

Published: 30 June 2008

Abstract

We show that although the currently available isochore mapping methods agree on the isochore classification of about two-thirds of the human DNA, they produce significantly different results with regard to the location of isochore boundaries and isochore length distribution. We present a new consensus isochore assignment method based on majority voting and provide IsoBase, a comprehensive on-line database of isochore maps for all completely sequenced vertebrate genomes.