title: Divergence and Shannon information in genomes.
abstract: Shannon information (SI) and its special case, divergence, are defined for a DNA sequence in terms of probabilities of chemical words in the sequence and are computed for a set of complete genomes highly diverse in length and composition. We find the following: SI (but not divergence) is inversely proportional to sequence length for a random sequence but is length independent for genomes; the genomic SI is always greater and, for shorter words and longer sequences, hundreds to thousands times greater than the SI in a random sequence whose length and composition match those of the genome; genomic SIs appear to have word-length dependent universal values. The universality is inferred to be an evolution footprint of a universal mode for genome growth.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan 320, Republic of China.
authors.forename: Hong-Da
authors.initials: HD
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Chang-Heng
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Li-Ching
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Hsieh
authors.forename: Hoong-Chien
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D019277:Entropy; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005798:Genes, Bacterial; D016678:Genome; D016680:Genome, Bacterial; D015233:Models, Statistical; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012984:Software; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D004247:DNA