Figure 6

An information-theoretical comparison of genome complexity. Relative increases of PICKY computation time and additional probes it can find for the 13 model species are shown. When its design constraints are relaxed, PICKY has to compare more probe candidates against nontargets to decide whether these probe candidates can correctly identify their targets. A genome is considered more complex if the extensive thermodynamic comparison identifies more distinguishable gene sequences that can be targeted by microarray probes. For maize, mouse and human, more probes can be gained than the extra time spent to calculate them, which suggests that these species may have more complex genomes.