Dot plot (bioinformatics)

Imagine you have a set of toys, and you want to organize them based on their colors. Dot plot is like making a picture of how many toys you have of each color.

You draw a line, and then you put a dot above the line for each toy of that color. So if you have three blue toys, you put three dots above the line at the blue spot.

In bioinformatics, researchers use dot plots to compare DNA or RNA sequences. Instead of toys, they use sequences of letters that represent the genetic code.

They put one sequence on the x-axis and another sequence on the y-axis of the dot plot. Then, they put a dot at each position where the two sequences have the same letter.

This makes a picture of where the sequences are the same and where they are different. This can help the researchers find similarities and differences between different organisms or different parts of the same genome.