NASA NTRS · 20040089405
Statistical properties of DNA sequences
Abstract
We review evidence supporting the idea that the DNA sequence in genes containing non-coding regions is correlated, and that the correlation is remarkably long range--indeed, nucleotides thousands of base pairs distant are correlated. We do not find such a long-range correlation in the coding regions of the gene. We resolve the problem of the "non-stationarity" feature of the sequence of base pairs by applying a new algorithm called detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). We address the claim of Voss that there is no difference in the statistical properties of coding and non-coding regions of DNA by systematically applying the DFA algorithm, as well as standard FFT analysis, to every DNA sequence (33301 coding and 29453 non-coding) in the entire GenBank database. Finally, we describe briefly some recent work showing that the non-coding sequences have certain statistical features in common with natural and artificial languages. Specifically, we adapt to DNA the Zipf approach to analyzing linguistic texts. These statistical properties of non-coding sequences support the possibility that non-coding regions of DNA may carry biological information.
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Peng, C. K., Buldyrev, S. V., Goldberger, A. L., Havlin, S., Mantegna, R. N., Simons, M., Stanley, H. E.. 1995-01-01. Statistical properties of DNA sequences. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20040089405
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