Microbial genome as a fluctuating system: Distribution and correlation of coding sequence lengths

TL;DR

This study analyzes microbial genome coding sequence lengths as fluctuating systems using statistical physics, revealing exponential distribution patterns and short-range correlations, contrasting with linguistic Zipf's law.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of statistical physics methods to characterize microbial genome coding sequence length distributions and correlations.

Findings

Coding sequence lengths do not follow Zipf's law.

Distribution is closer to exponential.

Series exhibit short-range memory properties.

Abstract

The length of coding sequence series in microbial genomes were regarded as a fluctuating system and characterized by the methods of statistical physics. The distribution and the correlatin properties of 50 genomes including bacteria and several archaea were investigated. The distribution was investigated by rank-size analysis (Zipf's law. We found that coding sequence lengths series do not obey Zipf's law contrary to natural languages. The distribution was found to be more closely to an exponential distribution. The correlation appeared to be similar to natural languages. Segmentation analysis of the series showed to be short range memory systems.