Jaakkola Salla, El-Showk Sedeer, Annila Arto
Department of Biosciences, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
Biophys Chem. 2008 May;134(3):232-8. doi: 10.1016/j.bpc.2008.02.006. Epub 2008 Feb 23.
Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, intergenic 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 increasing entropy. According to thermodynamics of open systems, genomes evolve toward diversity by various mechanisms that increase, decrease and distribute genomic material in response to thermodynamic driving forces. Evolution results in an excessive genome, a high-entropy ecosystem of its own, where copious non-coding segments associate with low-level functions and conserved sequences code coordinated activities. The rate of entropy increase, equivalent to the rate of free energy decrease, is identified with the universal fitness criterion of natural selection that governs populations of genomic entities as well as other species.
真核生物基因组包含过多的内含子、基因间序列和其他非基因序列，这些序列似乎没有重要的功能作用或表型表现。它们的存在是一个长期存在的谜题，从熵增加的原理来看待。根据开放系统的热力学，基因组通过各种机制朝着多样性进化，这些机制根据热力学驱动力增加、减少和分布基因组物质。进化导致了一个过度的基因组，它自身是一个高熵生态系统，其中大量非编码片段与低水平功能相关联，而保守序列编码协调的活动。熵增加的速率等同于自由能减少的速率，它与自然选择的普遍适应性标准相关联，自然选择支配着基因组实体群体以及其他物种。
