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Updated: May 20, 2026

Hi-C: A Method to Study the Three-dimensional Architecture of Genomes.
Published on: May 6, 2010
Scaling law: a global topological property of genetic sequences
1School of Physics and Optical Information Technology, Jiaying University, 514015 MeiZhou, People's Republic of China. slbu@ustc.edu
Abstract:
Here, we study the topological properties of genetic sequence by viewing the entire sequence as a whole. First, a systematic way of coding the gene-combinations in a genetic sequence is developed. Next, we apply the coding method to real genetic sequences, and find a scale-free power-law distribution for some particular kinds of gene-combinations. Furthermore, we also present a model to reproduce the observed scale-free feature, which is based on three generic mechanisms: 1) Growth mechanism - genetic sequences expands continuously by the addition of new codon; 2) Preferential replication mechanism - the newly added codon at every time step is a replication of one of existed condons, and the probability that a codon is replicated is proportional to its emerging times in existed sequence; and 3) Mutation mechanism - following (2) the newly added codon has a small probability to mutate. To our knowledge, no report has been published to study the genetic sequences in such way.
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