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Scaling Behavior of Maximal Repeat Distributions in Genomic Sequences

2008; IGI Global; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4018/jcini.2008070103

1557-3966

J.D. Wang, Hsiang-Chuan Liu, Jeffrey J. P. Tsai, Ka‐Lok Ng,

Genetic diversity and population structure

The genome sequences data from various organisms were analyzed, and it is found that the relative frequency distributions of maximal repeat sequences P(k) verses the frequency of appearance k exhibits scaling behavior (P(k) ~ k-?). Correlation analysis provides very good evidence (with a coefficient of determination r2 > 0.875 for every case studied case, and the scaling relation is valid over three orders of magnitude of k) supporting that the distributions are well described by the power-law. It is found that the scaling behavior holds at the chromosome level, for different organelles (nucleus, chloroplast and mitochondria) and for a very wide range of taxa, such as Fungi, Algea, Protozoa, Archaea, bacteria, Plants, Nematode. This result is quite surprise as it suggests that (1) the scaling behavior seems to be universal and probably independent of the organisms, and (2) genomic sequences have features resembles natural languages.