Non-extensive Trends in the Size Distribution of Coding and Non-coding DNA Sequences in the Human Genome

Abstract

We study the primary DNA structure of four of the most completely sequenced human chromosomes (including chromosome 19 which is the most dense in coding), using Non-extensive Statistics. We show that the exponents governing the decay of the coding size distributions vary between $5.2 \le r \le 5.7$ for the short scales and $1.45 \le q \le 1.50$ for the large scales. On the contrary, the exponents governing the decay of the non-coding size distributions in these four chromosomes, take the values $2.4 \le r \le 3.2$ for the short scales and $1.50 \le q \le 1.72$ for the large scales. This quantitative difference, in particular in the tail exponent $q$, indicates that the non-coding (coding) size distributions have long (short) range correlations. This non-trivial difference in the DNA statistics is attributed to the non-conservative (conservative) evolution dynamics acting on the non-coding (coding) DNA sequences.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, 2 table