DOI: 10.1209/epl/i2003-00341-6
Europhys. Lett., 62 (2) , pp. 271-277 (2003)

Scaling violations in coding DNA

A. Som¹, S. Sahoo¹, I. Mukhopadhyay², J. Chakrabarti¹ and R. Chaudhury<sup>3

1</sup>  Department of Theoretical Physics, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science Calcutta 700 032, India
²  Department of Statistics, Burdwan University - Burdwan 713 104, India
³  S.N. Bose Centre for Basic Sciences, Block-JD, Sector 3 Salt Lake, Calcutta 700 098, India

tpjc@mahendra.iacs.res.in

(Received 11 June 2002; accepted in final form 19 February 2003)

Abstract
DNA sequences are known to scale like fractals. We study coding DNA and find, however, that these are not characterised by a single scaling index. The behaviour changes, somewhat abruptly, at about a few hundred bases. We study the Discrete Fourier Transform and find that the index-change appears in the plot of power spectrum vs. frequency. Interestingly, an enhancement of the spectral density is observed in the region of the index change. We study the peak heights at a frequency of as a function of the length scale and find, once again, changes in the scaling index near these critical lengths.

PACS
82.35.Pq - Biopolymers, biopolymerization.
87.14.-g - Biomolecules: types.
02.50.Ey - Stochastic processes.

© EDP Sciences 2003