Shannon information in complete genomes

Author

Chang, Chang-Heng ; Hsieh, Li-Ching ; Chen, Ta-Yuan ; Chen, Hong-Da ; Luo, Liaofu ; Lee, Hoong-Chien

Author_Institution

Nat. Central Univ., Chung-li, Taiwan

fYear

2004

fDate

16-19 Aug. 2004

Firstpage

20

Lastpage

30

Abstract

Shannon information in the genomes of all completely sequenced prokaryotes and eukaryotes are measured in word lengths of two to ten letters. It is found that in a scale-dependent way, the Shannon information in complete genomes are much greater than that in matching random sequences - thousands of times greater in the case of short words. Furthermore, with the exception of the 14 chromosomes of Plasmodium falciparum, the Shannon information in all available complete genomes belong to a universality class given by an extremely simple formula. The data are consistent with a model for genome growth composed of two main ingredients: random segmental duplications that increase the Shannon information in a scale-independent way, and random point mutations that preferentially reduces the larger-scale Shannon information. The inference drawn from the present study is that the large-scale and coarse-grained growth of genomes was selectively neutral and this suggests an independent corroboration of Kimura´s neutral theory of evolution.

Keywords

biology computing; genetics; microorganisms; molecular biophysics; Kimura neutral evolution theory; Plasmodium falciparum; Shannon information; chromosomes; complete genomes; completely sequenced prokaryotes; eukaryotes; random point mutations; random segmental duplications; Bioinformatics; Biological cells; Electronic mail; Entropy; Frequency; Genetic mutations; Genomics; Length measurement; Physics; Random sequences;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference, 2004. CSB 2004. Proceedings. 2004 IEEE

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2194-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CSB.2004.1332413

Filename

1332413