Why are the dot-plots of sequence comparisons also called “Oxford” plots?
work in progress
Wikipedia credits Gibbs and McIntyre (1970) for the invention of dot-plot graphs to compare two biological sequences. Gibbs and McIntyre are from the University of Canberra, but the dot-plots are sometimes called “Oxford” plots or grids. Is Wikipedia missing a reference? I screened the papers citing Gibbs and McIntyre, and found that [[Maize and Lenk (1981)]|biblio/6801656]], from the NIH, also cite other papers: 1) Tinoco, Uhlenbeck and Levine (1971) from the University of Berkeley, that shows a base pairing matrix, 2) Fitch (1969) (PMID 5364927) from the University of Winsconsin, with no dot plot, and McLachlan (1970) (PMID 5167087) from the University of Cambridge, with a sequence comparison matrix for two proteins.
Tinoco I Jr, Uhlenbeck OC, Levine MD.
Nature. 1971 Apr 9;230(5293):362-7. doi:10.1038/230362a0
Estimation of secondary structure in ribonucleic acids.
The base pairing matrix in figure 2 looks like an ”Oxford” plot.
Gibbs AJ, McIntyre GA.
Eur J Biochem. 1970 Sep;16(1):1-11. doi:10.1111/j.1432-1033.1970.tb01046.x
The diagram, a method for comparing sequences. Its use with amino acid and nucleotide sequences.