Nearest-neighbor spacing distribution of basis in some intron-less and intron-containing DNA sequences

Abstract

We show that the nearest neighbor distribution of distances between basis pairs of some intron-less and intron-containing coding regions are the same when a procedure, called unfolding, is applied. Such a procedure consists in separating the secular variations from the oscillatory terms. The form of the distribution obtained is quite similar to that of a random, i.e., Poissonian, sequence. This is done for the HUMBMYH7CD, DROMYONMA, HUMBMYH7 and DROMHC sequences. The first two correspond to highly coding regions while the last two correspond to non-coding regions. We also show that the distributions before the unfolding procedure depend on the secular part but, after the unfolding procedure we obtain an striking result: all distributions are similar to each other. The result becomes independent of the content of introns or the species we have chosen. This is in contradiction with the results obtained with the detrended fluctuation analysis in which the correlations yield different results for intron-less and intron-containing regions.