Tables of critical values for examining compositional non-randomness in proteins and nucleic acids

A binomially distributed statistic is defined to show whether or not the proportion of a particular amino acid in a protein deviates from random expectation. An analogous statistic is derived for nucleotides in nucleic acids. These new statistics are simply related to the classical chi-squared test. They explicitly account for the compositional fluctuations imposed by the finite length of proteins, and they are more accurate than previous tables.