Computational prediction of the origin of replication is a challenging problem 
and of immense interest to biologists. Several methods have been proposed for 
identifying the replicon site for various classes of organisms. However, these 
methods have limited applicability since the replication mechanism is different 
in different organisms. We propose a correlation measure and show that it is 
correctly able to predict the origin of replication in most of the bacterial 
genomes. When applied to Methanocaldococcus jannaschii, Plasmodium falciparum 
apicoplast and Nicotiana tabacum plastid, this correlation based method is able 
to correctly predict the origin of replication whereas the generally used GC 
skew measure fails. Thus, this correlation based measure is a novel and 
promising tool for predicting the origin of replication in a wide class of 
organisms. This could have important implications in not only gaining a deeper 
understanding of the replication machinery in higher organisms, but also for 
drug discovery.