Physica A. 1995;221:180-92.  

Statistical properties of DNA sequences.

Peng CK, Buldyrev SV, Goldberger AL, Havlin S, Mantegna RN, Simons M, Stanley
HE.

Cardiovascular Division, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02215, USA.

We review evidence supporting the idea that the DNA sequence in genes containing
non-coding regions is correlated, and that the correlation is remarkably long
range--indeed, nucleotides thousands of base pairs distant are correlated. We do
not find such a long-range correlation in the coding regions of the gene. We
resolve the problem of the "non-stationarity" feature of the sequence of base
pairs by applying a new algorithm called detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA).
We address the claim of Voss that there is no difference in the statistical
properties of coding and non-coding regions of DNA by systematically applying
the DFA algorithm, as well as standard FFT analysis, to every DNA sequence
(33301 coding and 29453 non-coding) in the entire GenBank database. Finally, we
describe briefly some recent work showing that the non-coding sequences have
certain statistical features in common with natural and artificial languages.
Specifically, we adapt to DNA the Zipf approach to analyzing linguistic texts.
These statistical properties of non-coding sequences support the possibility
that non-coding regions of DNA may carry biological information.

PMID: 11540495 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]