Fractal landscapes in biological systems: long-range correlations in DNA and interbeat heart intervals

Here we discuss recent advances in applying ideas of fractals and disordered systems to two topics of biological interest, both topics having common the appearance of scale-free phenomena, i.e., correlations that have no characteristic length scale, typically exhibited by physical systems near a critical point and dynamical systems far from equilibrium. (i) DNA nucleotide sequences have traditionally been analyzed using models which incorporate the possibility of short-range nucleotide correlations. We found, instead, a remarkably long-range power law correlation. We found such long-range correlations in intron-containing genes and in non-transcribed regulatory DNA sequences as well as intragenomic DNA, but not in cDNA sequences or intron-less genes. We also found that the myosin heavy chain family gene evolution increases the fractal complexity of the DNA landscapes, consistent with the intron-late hypothesis of gene evolution. (ii) The healthy heartbeat is traditionally thought to be regulated according to the classical principle of homeostasis, whereby physiologic systems operate to reduce variability and achieve an equilibrium-like state. We found, however, that under normal conditions, beat-to-beat fluctuations in heart rate display long-range power law correlations.     

Toeplitz and Hankel type operators on the upper half-plane

An orthogonal decomposition of admissible wavelets is constructed via the Laguerre polynomials, it turns to give a complete decomposition of the space of square integrable functions on the upper half-plane with the measurey dxdy. The first subspace is just the weighted Bergman (or Dzhrbashyan) space. Three types of Ha-plitz operators are defined, they are the generalization of classical Toeplitz, small and big Hankel operators respectively. Their boundedness, compactness and Schatten-von Neumann properties are studied.Research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.