Nucleotide composition effects on the long-range correlations in human genes

We use the wavelet transform to investigate the fractal scaling properties of coding and noncoding human DNA sequences. We find that the strength of the long-range correlations observed in the introns increases with the guanine-cytosine (GC) content, while coding sequences show no such correlations at any GC content. However, we demonstrate that long-range correlations can be detected when the coding sequences are undersampled by retaining the third base of each codon only. This strongly suggests that the observed correlations are not likely to be due to insertion-deletion mechanisms. We comment about the origin of these correlations in terms of putative dynamical processes that could produce the isochore structure of the human genome. Received: 18 August 1997 / Accepted: 29 October 1997