From: Koonin, Eugene (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [E]
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2006 9:23 AM
To: NLM/NCBI List ncbi-seminar
Subject: reminder: seminar at 11



February 6, Monday, 11 AM
Bldg. 38A, B2 Conference room
 
Suzanne Sindi
 
Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park
 
DNA Repeats: Power Laws and Proximities
 
 
I will analyze and discuss a variety of striking features in exactly
repetitive sequence in the genomes of C. elegans, A. thaliana, D.
melanogaster and human. I find a power law distribution in the number of
times a given k-mer occurs in a genome. I analyze in detail the
separation between copies of k-mers that occur exactly twice in a
chromosome and observe a strong preference for "small" separations (less
than 0.5% of the length of the chromosome). I introduce a type of
exactly repetitive region, which we call a repeat string, and find a
power law distribution in the lengths of repeat strings.  I discuss a
stochastic dynamical system that models the evolution of repeat strings
in a genome whose stationary distribution is also a power law.