Characterization of DNA methylation as a function of biological complexity via dinucleotide inter-distances
Abstract
We perform a statistical study of the distances between successive occurrencies of a given dinucleotide in the DNA sequence for a number of organisms of different complexity. Our analysis highlights peculiar features of the dinucleotide CG distribution in mammalian DNA, pointing towards a connection with the role of such dinucleotide in DNA methylation. While the CG distributions of mammals exhibit exponential tails with comparable parameters, the picture for the other organisms studied (e.g., fish, insects, bacteria and viruses) is more heterogeneous, possibly because in these organisms DNA methylation has different functional roles. Our analysis suggests that the distribution of the distances between dinucleotides CG provides useful insights in characterizing and classifying organisms in terms of methylation functionalities.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1511.08445,
title = {Characterization of DNA methylation as a function of biological complexity via dinucleotide inter-distances},
author = {Giulia Paci and Giampaolo Cristadoro and Barbara Monti and Marco Lenci and Mirko Degli Esposti and Gastone C. Castellani and Daniel Remondini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.08445},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
13 pages, 5 figures. To be published in the Philosophical Transactions A theme issue "DNA as information"