DNA repeats detection using BW spectrograms

Abstract

The presence of repeated sequences is a fundamental feature of genomes and detection of repeats is important in biology and medicine as it can be used for phylogenic studies and disease diagnosis. A major difficulty in identification of repeats arises from the fact that the repeat units can be either exact or imperfect, in tandem or dispersed, and of unspecified length. This paper presents results obtained by combining BW spectrograms with a novel numerical representation to isolate position and length of tandem repeats (TRs) in DNA sequences.