相关论文: How much non-coding DNA do eukaryotes require?

Background: Prior to the current genomic era it was suggested that the number of protein-coding genes that an organism made use of was a valid measure of its complexity. It is now clear, however, that major incongruities exist and that…

Data on the number of Open Reading Frames (ORFs) coded by genomes from the 3 domains of Life show some notable general features including essential differences between the Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes, with the number of ORFs growing linearly…

Significant fraction (98.5% in humans) of most animal genomes is non- coding dark matter. Its largely unknown function (1-5) is related to programming (rather than to spontaneous mutations) of accurate adaptation to rapidly changing…

Nowadays, due to the increasing amount of experimental data obtained by sequencing, the most interest is focused on determining the functions and characteristics of its individual parts of the genome instead of determining the nucleotide…

Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…

A general theoretical framework is put forth to organize and understand various observed phenomena and mathematical relationships in the field of molecular biology. By modeling each cell in eukaryotic organisms as a processor having a…

The unconstrained genomic DNA of bacteria forms a coil, which volume exceeds 1000 times the volume of the cell. Since prokaryotes lack a membrane-bound nucleus, in sharp contrast with eukaryotes, the DNA may consequently be expected to…

An approach for approximately calculating the number of genes in a genome is presented, which takes into account the average protein length expected for the species. A number of virus, bacterial and eukaryotic genomes are scrutinized.…

We study the primary DNA structure of four of the most completely sequenced human chromosomes (including chromosome 19 which is the most dense in coding), using Non-extensive Statistics. We show that the exponents governing the decay of the…

The problem of differentiating the informational content of coding (exons) and non-coding (introns) regions of a DNA sequence is one of the central problems of genomics. The introns are estimated to be nearly 95% of the DNA and since they…

The genetic material of a eukaryotic cell comprises both nuclear DNA (ncDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). These differ markedly in several aspects but nevertheless must encode proteins that are compatible with one another. Here we…

The genes of eukaryotes are characterized by protein coding fragments, the exons, interrupted by introns, i.e. stretches of DNA which do not carry any useful information for the protein synthesis. We have analyzed the melting behavior of…

Gene essentiality refers to the degree to which a gene is necessary for the survival and reproductive efficacy of a living organism. Although the essentiality of non-coding genes has been documented, there are still aspects of non-coding…

Till now, in biological sciences, the term, transcription, mainly refers to DNA to RNA transcription. But our recently published experimental findings obtained from Plasmodium falciparum strongly suggest the existence of DNA to DNA…

Much evolutionary information is stored in the fluctuations of protein length distributions. The genome size and non-coding DNA content can be calculated based only on the protein length distributions. So there is intrinsic relationship…

Natively unfolded proteins exist as an ensemble of flexible conformations lacking a well defined tertiary structure along a large portion of their polypeptide chain. Despite the absence of a stable configuration, they are involved in…

The codons, sixtyfour in number, are distributed over the coding parts of DNA sequences. The distribution function is the plot of frequency-versus-rank of the codons. These distributions are characterised by parameters that are almost…

Determining the full complement of protein-coding genes is a key goal of genome annotation. The most powerful approach for confirming protein coding potential is the detection of cellular protein expression through peptide mass spectrometry…

DNA is subject to large deformations in a wide range of biological processes. Two key examples illustrate how such deformations influence the readout of the genetic information: the sequestering of eukaryotic genes by nucleosomes, and DNA…

Nucleosome core particle is a dynamic structure -- DNA may transiently peel off the histone octamer surface due to thermal fluctuations or the action of chromatin remodeling enzymes. Partial DNA unwrapping enables easier access of…