Functional Ambigraphic Notations
Additional functionality can be found in nucleic acid notations that use ambigrams to mirror structural symmetries found in the DNA double helix. As defined by Douglas Hofstadter, ambigrams are words or symbols that convey the same or different meaning when viewed in a different orientation. It turns out that by assigning ambigraphic characters to complementary bases (i.e. guanine = b, cytosine = q, adenine = n, and thymine = u), it is possible to complement entire DNA sequences by simply rotating the text 180 degrees. An ambigraphic nucleic acid notation also makes it easy to identify genetic palindromes, such as endonuclease restriction sites, as sections of text that can be rotated 180 degrees without changing the sequence.
Read more about this topic: Nucleic Acid Notation
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