The rapid growth in additions to databases of DNA primary sequence data have led to searches for methods to numerically characterize these data and help in fast identification and retrieval of relevant sequences. The DNA descriptors derived from the 2D graphical representation technique have already been proposed to index chemical toxicity and single nucleotide polymorphic (SNP) genes but the inherent degeneracies in this representation have given rise to doubts about their suitability. We prove in this paper that such degeneracies will exist only in very restricted cases and that the method can be relied upon to provide unique descriptors for, in particular, the SNP genes and several other classes of DNA sequences. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.