Pavlidis, Ioannis T.2018-11-302018-11-30May 20182018-05May 2018http://hdl.handle.net/10657/3435Random primer amplification (RPA) is a technique widely used in a variety of genomic studies. Nonrandom distribution of short sequences across Human, animal, and bacterial genomes, however, causes bias which affects the amplification process and downstream analysis. The presented work focuses on computational strategies to explore statistical properties of the frequencies and location distributions of all possible short subsequences (6-8 mers) in human, animal, and bacterial genomes and use them to guide the primer design process in order to: reduce bias in single genome (human/animal) amplification and perform preferential microbial enrichment in the presence of host DNA.application/pdfengThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)BioinformaticsRandom Primer AmplificationMetagenomics2018-11-30Thesisborn digital