Method

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

Thorsten Schmidt¹ and Dmitrij Frishman^1,2

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

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

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2008, 9:R104doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-6-r104

Published:	30 June 2008

Subject areas: Bioinformatics, Genome studies, Methods

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.