Thank you, "sequence logo" was the term I was missing :)
The plot is from this publication, see page 2 the bottom of the plot with ACTG letters in different colours and sizes.
- Could anyone clarify in layman's terms what it represents?
- More importantly, how do we plot it using R or any other tools?
Here is the plot, if you can't access the paper:
Found related post at SO: Plotting a “sequence logo” using ggplot2?
4 answers
That type of plot is called Sequence Logo. The X axis represent the nucleotide positions of a sequence, and the Y the entropy of each possible nucleotide. The size of each letter indicates how frequently it is found at that position: for example position 8 is almost always an A, while position 5 can be a T or C.
You can create sequence logos from a web interface using a popular application called WebLogo, or using R packages such as SequenceLogo.
The plot shows the comparison of the reference human sequence with N-number of samples (patients). The samples turn to have variation of sequences in that region. Now from these samples, you can compare the probability how often a given nucleotide is mismatched/mutated in sapmles. If the letter is big it means the sequence is invariant.
You can use weblogo either in their webpage or in R to make that figure.
Or if you have Chip-seq peaks, you can do motif analysis and make those plots using HOMER tools.
X axis 1 to 10, is it SNP position, why 1 to 10 and not genomic positions?
You might want to add this as an answer to this post, too. Plotting a "sequence logo" using ggplot2?
Thanks. Done.
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See Represent Motifs On A Dna Sequence In A Graphical Way, Creating Sequence Logos From The Command Line, Sequence Logos With Weblogo Scale