shannon information and power law analysis of the chromosome code香农信息和幂律的染色体分析代码.pdf

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Abstract and Applied Analysis Volume 2012, Article ID 439089, 13 pages doi:10.1155/2012/439089 Research Article Shannon Information and Power Law Analysis of the Chromosome Code J. A. Tenreiro Machado Department of Electrical Engineering, Institute of Engineering of Polytechnic of Porto, Rua Dr. Antonio Bernardino de Almeida, 431, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal ´ Correspondence should be addressed to J. A. Tenreiro Machado, jtm@isep.ipp.pt Received 8 June 2012; Revised 17 August 2012; Accepted 21 August 2012 Academic Editor: Dumitru Baleanu ˇ Copyright q 2012 J. A. Tenreiro Machado. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper studies the information content of the chromosomes of twenty-three species. Several statistics considering different number of bases for alphabet character encoding are derived. Based on the resulting histograms, word delimiters and character relative frequencies are identified. The knowledge of this data allows moving along each chromosome while evaluating the flow of characters and words. The resulting flux of information is captured by means of Shannon entropy. The results are explored in the perspective of power law relationships allowing a quantitative evaluation of the DNA of the species. 1. Introduction During the last years the genome sequencing project produced a large volume of data that is presently available for computational processing 1–14. Researchers have been tackling the information content of the deoxyribonucleic acid DNA, but interesting quest