COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GENOMIC DATA: A GLOBAL LOOK AT STRUCTURAL AND REGULATORY FEATURES

One of the goals of any large scale DNA sequencing project is to understand the molecular details about the metabolic control sites that will be found in the sequence of the chromosome region being studied. In addition, once an interesting observation has been made, questions will quickly arise concerning the distribution of such sites within the genome and how well the same observations hold between related species.

This paper will discuss our approach toward building a flexible analysis environment that facilitates the analysis of genomic sequence data. The Integrated Genomic Database (IGD),⁵ developed by Ray Hagstrom, Ross Overbeek, Morgan Price and Dave Zawada at the Argonne National Laboratory, organizes genome mapping and sequencing data to provide a global chromosome view for multiple genomes. We describe here our use of the IGD system and how we employ it for relational analysis of sequence features that are found distributed throughout the genome under study. The primary goal of this work is to provide a system to support research on the global organization of genomic regulation patterns.