Information-theoretical entropy as a measure of sequence variability.

Abstract excerpt

We propose the use of the information-theoretical entrophy, S = -sigman pi log2 pi, as a measure of variability at a given position in a set of aligned sequences. pi stands for the fraction of times the i-th type appears at a position. For protein sequences, the sum has up to 20 terms, for nucleotide sequences, up to 4 terms, and for codon sequences, up to 61 terms. We compare S and Vs, a related measure, in...

Topics

• Amino Acid Sequence
• Chemical Phenomena
• Chemistry, Physical
• Genetic Variation
• Humans
• Immunoglobulins
• Information Theory
• Models, Statistical
• Molecular Sequence Data
• Sequence Alignment