Universal power law behaviors in genomic sequences and evolutionary models

Abstract

We study the length distribution of a particular class of DNA sequences known as 5'UTR exons. These exons belong to the messanger RNA of protein coding genes, but they are not coding (they are located upstream of the coding portion of the mRNA) and are thus less constrained from an evolutionary point of view. We show that both in mouse and in human these exons show a very clean power law decay in their length distribution and suggest a simple evolutionary model which may explain this finding. We conjecture that this power law behaviour could indeed be a general feature of higher eukaryotes.