Elsevier, Methods in Microbiology, p. 49-63, 2002
DOI: 10.1016/s0580-9517(02)33004-6
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This chapter discusses several different applications of Atlases for visualizing different types of information, within the context of the whole plasmid or chromosome. Essentially, any type of information, concerning the DNA, RNA, or protein can be plotted along the chromosome, allowing rapid analysis of global properties in a serendipitous manner. The atlas gives the researcher the option to view the calculated or experimentally measured data in a position-dependent way, and thereby see correlations between a feature and its position or variation in a feature within the chromosome. The atlas can be used to spot variation in different features within a region, but not all the information can be viewed at the same time. For a bacterial chromosome of the same size as E. coli, only features with approximately the same size as a gene or larger can be observed. This means that some of the features major with repeats in intergenic regions would not be visible in the E. coli genome. If variation in a smaller scale is to be seen for a large chromosome, a shorter region should be visualized.