Universal power law behaviors in genomic sequences and evolutionary models

TL;DR

This study reveals that 5'UTR exons in mouse and human genomes follow a power law length distribution, suggesting a universal pattern in non-coding genomic regions across higher eukaryotes, explained by a simple evolutionary model.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates a universal power law behavior in the length distribution of 5'UTR exons and proposes a model explaining this pattern as a common feature in higher eukaryotes.

Findings

Power law decay observed in 5'UTR exon lengths in mouse and human.

Proposed evolutionary model accounts for the power law behavior.

Suggests universality of this pattern in higher eukaryotes.

Abstract

We study the length distribution of a particular class of DNA sequences known as 5'UTR exons. These exons belong to the messanger RNA of protein coding genes, but they are not coding (they are located upstream of the coding portion of the mRNA) and are thus less constrained from an evolutionary point of view. We show that both in mouse and in human these exons show a very clean power law decay in their length distribution and suggest a simple evolutionary model which may explain this finding. We conjecture that this power law behaviour could indeed be a general feature of higher eukaryotes.