Based on the classifications of the four nucleic acid bases, He and Wang reduced a DNA sequence to three binary sequences, which are called the characteristic sequences (J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 42 (2002) 1080). In this paper, we associate each characteristic sequence with a (b)L / (b)L matrix by giving a 2-D 'two horizontal lines' graphical representation, and thus obtain a 3-component vector with entries being the sums of the maximal and minimal eigenvalues of the (b)L / (b)L matrices. The introduced vector results in more simple characterizations and comparisons among the coding sequences of exon 1 of beta-globin gene of eleven different species.