So, the key insight is that many integers in genomics can be thought of intervals or
perhaps sets of intervals of integers.
So here's a screenshot from the UCSC genome browser.
It's a somewhat randomly chosen gene.
And we can see that genes intervals.
They are DNA's clusters.
They are SNPs.
They are repeat mask regions of the genome.
And basically many, many, many integers in genomics can be thought of as intervals.
Promoters, Genes, single-nucleotide polymorphism,
which are really intervals, but consist of only a single base, CpG Islands.
But also, data,
such as next-generation sequencing reads after they've been mapped.
Once a reader's been mapped to the genome, it's an interval.
All sequence data that has been processed is at fault.
Perhaps, you have done a gypsy experiment and you've done pcoding and
you end up with peaks that are often described as intervals with some score
associated to them.