The Clusters of Transmembrane Protein Genes in Prokaryotic Genomes

It is known that genes which code functionally related proteins tend to be closely located each other on genomes. This property helps us to research functionally unknown genes. Transmembrane proteins (TMPs), which account for 20-30% of proteomes, exist in the biological membrane and have essential roles in transmission of materials and information through the membrane. We are interested in how genes coding TMPs are distributed in the genomes. Whether the TMP genes are distributed uniformly or in a cluster on the genomes? In this study, we concentrate on TMP genes and investigate their locations on genomes by a novel method, where genes are expressed as alphanumericals, and genomes are treated as strings of the characters, which are denoted as “genesequences”. In the gene-sequences, clusters of consecutive characters expressing TMP genes are defined as TMP-gene clusters.