Sublinear Growth of Information in DNA Sequences

Abstract

We introduce a novel method to analyse complete genomes and recognise some distinctive features by means of an adaptive compression algorithm, which is not DNA-oriented. We study the Information Content as a function of the number of symbols encoded by the algorithm. Preliminar results are shown concerning regions having a sublinear type of information growth, which is strictly connected to the presence of highly repetitive subregions that might be supposed to have a regulatory function within the genome.

30 pages, 13 figures, submitted (Oct. 2003)