Decimative Multiplication of Entropy Arrays, with Application to Influenza

William A Thompson,Joel K Weltman,Andy Martwick

doi:10.3390/e11030351

William A Thompson, Joel K Weltman + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/e11030351

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Abstract

The use of the digital signal processing procedure of decimation is introduced as a tool to detect patterns of information entropy distribution and is applied to information entropy in influenza A segment 7. Decimation was able to reveal patterns of entropy accumulation in archival and emerging segment 7 sequences that were not apparent in the complete, undecimated data. The low entropy accumulation along the first 25% of segment 7, revealed by the three frames of decimation, may be a sign of regulation at both protein and RNA levels to conserve important viral functions. Low segment 7 entropy values from the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic suggests either that: (1) the viruses causing the current outbreak have convergently evolved to their low entropy state or (2) more likely, not enough time has yet passed for the entropy to accumulate. Because of its dependence upon the periodicity of the codon, the decimative procedure should be generalizable to any biological system.

Highlights

In this study the digital signal processing technique of decimation [1] is introduced as a tool to analyze information entropy accumulation in sequences of nucleic acids
The sum of the decimated vectors equaled that of the undecimated vector and all linear correlation coefficients obtained for entropy distribution curves in this study were greater than 0.90, with p values that were indistinguishable from zero
Correlated synonymous variation of nucleotides reflects genetic organization that is invisible at the amino acid level. These results demonstrate how decimation of entropy can be a useful computational tool for helping to unravel the levels of information encoded in nucleotide sequences [10,11]

Summary

Introduction

In this study the digital signal processing technique of decimation [1] is introduced as a tool to analyze information entropy accumulation in sequences of nucleic acids. Decimative array multiplication is applied to the entropy of sequences of segment 7, one of the eight RNA segments encoding influenza [2] and is found to reveal patterns of entropy distribution that are otherwise hidden. Because, as it is applied in this study, it is based on the three-position periodicity of the codon, decimative multiplication should be generalizable to any biological system

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