Information Analysis of DNA Sequences

TL;DR

This study uses a modified entropy measure to analyze DNA sequences, revealing that non-coding introns carry nearly as much information as coding exons, challenging the idea that introns are 'junk DNA.'

Contribution

It introduces a length-normalized entropy approach to compare informational content of exons and introns, providing new insights into non-coding DNA.

Findings

Introns carry nearly as much information as exons.

Normalized entropy analysis disproves the 'junk DNA' hypothesis.

Method may aid in understanding genetic code symmetry models.

Abstract

The problem of differentiating the informational content of coding (exons) and non-coding (introns) regions of a DNA sequence is one of the central problems of genomics. The introns are estimated to be nearly 95% of the DNA and since they do not seem to participate in the process of transcription of amino-acids, they have been termed "junk DNA." Although it is believed that the non-coding regions in genomes have no role in cell growth and evolution, demonstration that these regions carry useful information would tend to falsify this belief. In this paper, we consider entropy as a measure of information by modifying the entropy expression to take into account the varying length of these sequences. Exons are usually much shorter in length than introns; therefore the comparison of the entropy values needs to be normalized. A length correction strategy was employed using randomly generated nucleonic base strings built out of the alphabet of the same size as the exons under question. Our analysis shows that introns carry nearly as much of information as exons, disproving the notion that they do not carry any information. The entropy findings of this paper are likely to be of use in further study of other challenging works like the analysis of symmetry models of the genetic code.