An analysis of symmetric words in human DNA: adjacent vs non-adjacent word distances

Abstract

It is important to develop methods for nding DNA sites with high potencial for the formation of hairpin/cruciform structures. In a previous work, we studied the distances between adjacent reversed complement words (symmetric words), and we observed that for some words some distances were favored. In the work presented here, we extended the study to the distance between non-adjacent reversed complement words and we observed strong periodicity in the distance distribution of some words. This may be an indication of potential for the formation of hairpin/cruciform structures.