title: Neutral evolution of duplicated DNA: an evolutionary stick-breaking process causes scale-invariant behavior.
abstract: Recently, an enrichment of identical matching sequences has been found in many eukaryotic genomes. Their length distribution exhibits a power law tail raising the question of what evolutionary mechanism or functional constraints would be able to shape this distribution. Here we introduce a simple and evolutionarily neutral model, which involves only point mutations and segmental duplications, and produces the same statistical features as observed for genomic data. Further, we extend a mathematical model for random stick breaking to analytically show that the exponent of the power law tail is -3 and universal as it does not depend on the microscopic details of the model.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Massip
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Peter F
authors.initials: PF
authors.lastname: Arndt
mesh_terms: D004247:DNA / Q000235:genetics*; D056890:Eukaryota; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D020440:Gene Duplication; D016678:Genome; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D008957:Models, Genetic; D017354:Point Mutation
chemical_list: D004247:DNA