Xiao Y, Chen R, Shen R, Sun J, Xu J
Department of Protein Engineering, Institute of Biophysics, Academia Sinica, Beijing, P.R. China.
J Theor Biol. 1995 Jul 7;175(1):23-6. doi: 10.1006/jtbi.1995.0117.
In this paper, the concept of fractal is applied to describe the features of nucleotide sequences. We introduce the mapping from nucleotide sequences to two-dimensional metric space. Then we use this mapping to study quantitatively the self-similarity of exon and intron sequences in different scales. We find that self-similarity exists in the geometrical range and main range of a nucleotide sequence and define the fractal dimension in these ranges. The results show that the fractal properties of exon sequences are quite different from those of introns, reflecting their difference in structure and function. The fractal dimension of the geometrical range may be used to predict the exon regions of a raw nucleotide sequence.
在本文中，分形的概念被应用于描述核苷酸序列的特征。我们引入了从核苷酸序列到二维度量空间的映射。然后我们利用这个映射来定量研究不同尺度下外显子和内含子序列的自相似性。我们发现核苷酸序列的几何范围和主要范围内存在自相似性，并在这些范围内定义了分形维数。结果表明，外显子序列的分形特性与内含子的分形特性有很大不同，反映了它们在结构和功能上的差异。几何范围的分形维数可用于预测原始核苷酸序列的外显子区域。
