Data Mining of VDJ Genes Reveals Interesting Clues

Hypervariability of the complementary determining regions in characteristic structure of Immunoglobulins and the distinct, cell-specific expressions of the genes coding for this important class of proteins pose intriguing problems in experimental and computational/informatics research requiring a special approach different from those for the other proteins. We present here an Average Linkage Hierarchical Clustering of the Homosapien VDJ genes and the Immunoglobulin polypeptides generated by them using special kind of data structures and correlation matrices in place of the microarray data. The results reveal interesting clues on the heterogeneity of exon - intron locations in these gene-families and its possible role in hypervariability of the Immunoglobulins.