Eur. Phys. J. B 50, 259-264 (2006)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2006-00121-2

Non-extensive trends in the size distribution of coding and non-coding DNA sequences in the human genome

¹ Institute of Physical Chemistry, National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, 15310 Athens, Greece
² School of Medicine, Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Athens, Goudi, 11527 Athens, Greece

Corresponding authors: ^a thoikonomou@chem.demokritos.gr - ^b aprovata@limnos.chem.demokritos.gr

Received: 25 October 2005
Revised: 1 December 2005
Published online: 12 April 2006

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 spatial decay of the coding size distributions vary between 5.2 ≤r ≤5.7 for the short scales and 1.45 ≤q ≤1.50 for the large scales. On the contrary, the exponents governing the spatial decay of the non-coding size distributions in these four chromosomes, take the values 2.4 ≤r ≤3.2 for the short scales and 1.50 ≤q ≤1.72 for the large scales. These results, in particular the values of the tail exponent q, indicate the existence of correlations in the coding and non-coding size distributions with tendency for higher correlations in the non-coding DNA.