Dot plot analysis of alpha satellite DNA

Detection of DNA repeats can be used for phylogenetic studies and disease diagnosis. A major difficulty in identification of DNA repeats arises from the fact that the repeat units can be either exact or imperfect, in tandem or dispersed, and of unspecified length. Numerical representation of genomic signals is very important as many of the methods for detecting repeated sequences are part of the digital signal processing field. This paper presents results obtained by combining a customized dot plot analysis with a numerical representation to isolate position and length of DNA repeats from human alpha satellite DNA.