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. 1984 Jul 11;12(13):5529–5543. doi: 10.1093/nar/12.13.5529

On the statistical assessment of similarities in DNA sequences.

J G Reich, H Drabsch, A Däumler
PMCID: PMC318937  PMID: 6462914

Abstract

The statistical behavior of the similarity score for unrelated DNA sequences calculated as letter-by-letter comparison or from various forms of optimal alignment was studied. It was found that natural DNA-sequences from a data base and true random sequences show the same statistical behavior in terms of such scores. This makes it possible to adopt a simple criterion for the rejection of fortuitous similarity. It is based on the mean and standard deviation of chance scores whose expected values, depending on chain length, gap penalty and probability of letter coincidence, may be calculated from formulae given in the paper.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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