title: Evolutionary dynamics of selfish DNA explains the abundance distribution of genomic subsequences.
abstract: Since the sequencing of large genomes, many statistical features of their sequences have been found. One intriguing feature is that certain subsequences are much more abundant than others. In fact, abundances of subsequences of a given length are distributed with a scale-free power-law tail, resembling properties of human texts, such as Zipf's law. Despite recent efforts, the understanding of this phenomenon is still lacking. Here we find that selfish DNA elements, such as those belonging to the Alu family of repeats, dominate the power-law tail. Interestingly, for the Alu elements the power-law exponent increases with the length of the considered subsequences. Motivated by these observations, we develop a model of selfish DNA expansion. The predictions of this model qualitatively and quantitatively agree with the empirical observations. This allows us to estimate parameters for the process of selfish DNA spreading in a genome during its evolution. The obtained results shed light on how evolution of selfish DNA elements shapes non-trivial statistical properties of genomes.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany.|Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sheinman
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ramisch
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany.|INRA, UR1404 Mathématique Informatique Appliquées du Génome á l'Environnement-F-78350 Jouy-en Josas, France.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Massip
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Peter F
authors.initials: PF
authors.lastname: Arndt
mesh_terms: D020087:Alu Elements / Q000235:genetics*; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D015894:Genome, Human / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D008957:Models, Genetic