Abstract : By conventional wisdom, a feature that occurs too often or too rarely in a genome can indicate a functional element. To infer functionality from frequency, it is crucial to precisely characterize occurrences in randomly evolving DNA. We find that the frequency of oligonucleotides in a genomic sequence follows primarily a Pareto-lognormal distribution, which encapsulates lognormal and power-law features found across all known genomes. Such a distribution could be the result of completely random evolution by a copying process. Our characterization of the entire frequency distribution of genomic words opens a way to a more accurate reasoning about their over- and underrepresentation in genomic sequences.
https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00448737
Contributor : Laurent Noé
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Submitted on : Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - 9:49:20 AM
Last modification on : Wednesday, April 17, 2019 - 12:15:34 PM
Miklós Csűrös, Laurent Noé, Gregory Kucherov. Reconsidering the significance of genomic word frequencies.. Trends in Genetics, Elsevier, 2007, 23 (11), pp.543-6. ⟨10.1016/j.tig.2007.07.008⟩. ⟨inria-00448737⟩
