Spectral Analysis of Guanine and Cytosine Fluctuations of Mouse Genomic DNA
Abstract
We study global fluctuations of the guanine and cytosine base content (GC%) in mouse genomic DNA using spectral analyses. Power spectra S(f) of GC% fluctuations in all nineteen autosomal and two sex chromosomes are observed to have the universal functional form S(f) 1/falpha (alpha ≈ 1) over several orders of magnitude in the frequency range 10-7< f < 10-5 cycle/base, corresponding to long-ranging GC% correlations at distances between 100 kb and 10 Mb. S(f) for higher frequencies (f > 10-5 cycle/base) shows a flattened power-law function with alpha < 1 across all twenty-one chromosomes. The substitution of about 38% interspersed repeats does not affect the functional form of S(f), indicating that these are not predominantly responsible for the long-ranged multi-scale GC% fluctuations in mammalian genomes. Several biological implications of the large-scale GC% fluctuation are discussed, including neutral evolutionary history by DNA duplication, chromosomal bands, spatial distribution of transcription units (genes), replication timing, and recombination hot spots.
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