Nonrandom Clusters Of Close Inverted Repeats In Herpesviruses And Poxviruses

A number of studies reported there are unusual clusters of palindromes, closely spacedrepeats and inverted repeats in the neighborhood of the replication origins of herpesviruses. Chewet al. (2005)^[1] quantified the measures of abundance of palindromes and introduced acomputational method to predict the locations of the replication origins. We apply theircomputational method to poxviruses. We introduce a new measure to quantify the abundance ofclosely spaced inverted repeats, and combine the BWS₁ score and our score for closely spacedrepeats to predict the likely locations of the replication origins in the herpesviruses. We comparethe performance of our computational method with the method of Chew et al. (2005)^[1].