Nucleotide Composition Effects on the Long-Range
Correlations in Human Genes
A. Arnéodo1, Y. d'Aubenton-Carafa2,
B. Audit1, E. Bacry3,
J.F. Muzy1, and C. Thermes 2
1
Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal, avenue Schweitzer, 33600 Pessac
Cedex, France
2
Centre de Génétique Moléculaire du CNRS, Allée de la Terrasse, 91198
Gif-sur-Yvette, France
3
Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées, École Polytechnique, 91128
Palaiseau, France
European Physical Journal,
B1:259-263 (1998)
Abstract
We use the wavelet transform to investigate the fractal scaling properties of
coding and noncoding human DNA sequences. We find that the strength of
the long-range correlations observed in the introns increases with the
guanine-cytosine (GC) content, while coding sequences show no such
correlations at any GC content. However, we demonstrate that long-range
correlations can be detected when the coding sequences are undersampled
by retaining the third base of each codon only. This strongly suggests that
the observed correlations are not likely to be due to insertion-deletion
mechanisms. We comment about the origin of these correlations in terms of
putative dynamical processes that could produce the isochore structure of
the human genome.
