About

The SymCurve software gets its name from the notion of DNA having “symmetry of curvature”. The idea is to look for evidence of DNA intrinsically having symmetrical curvature/bendability properties at the points where it wraps a Eukaryotic nucleosome core particle. The DNA double-helix wraps the nucleosome symmetrically around the histone octamter, so DNA curvature is expected to be similar on either side of the pseudodyad axis. Additionally, where the superhelical loops meet while spooling the nucleosome the DNA is expected to have similar curvature properties.

The algorithm was developed by Christoforos Nikolaou and published in “Structural constraints revealed in consistent nucleosome positions in the genome of S. cerevisiae”.

Originally the algorithm was implemented and published in in Perl, but has also been implemented more recently in Python. The links on the bio.tools are a bit stale, so the original Perl script is included in the GitHub repository for this project as well.