On mechanisms of neutral evolution of DNA resulting in scale-free behaviour

Abstract

We introduce a family of models incorporating random segmental substitutions and point mutations and demonstrate that such models reproduce algebraic length distributions of exact matches with the slope $-4$ observed earlier in pairwise comparisons of DNA of distantly related species. It is demonstrated that power-law distributions of exact matches emerge when shorter sequences transfer their DNA content to longer sequences, indicating potential mechanisms of the increased genome complexity.

This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to overlap with an earlier published work