title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Cardiovascular Division, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
authors.forename: C K
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.forename: S V
authors.initials: SV
authors.lastname: Buldyrev
authors.forename: A L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Goldberger
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Havlin
authors.forename: R N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Mantegna
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Simons
authors.forename: H E
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: Stanley
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001483:Base Sequence; D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry*; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D004926:Escherichia coli; D017709:Fractals; D006801:Humans; D007438:Introns; D007448:Invertebrates; D008037:Linguistics; D009710:Nucleotide Mapping; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012984:Software; D015003:Yeasts
chemical_list: D004247:DNA