Simplifying the mosaic description of DNA sequences

Abstract

By using the Jensen-Shannon divergence, genomic DNA can be divided into compositionally distinct domains through a standard recursive segmentation procedure. Each domain, while significantly different from its neighbors, may, however, share compositional similarity with one or more distant (non-neighboring) domains. We thus obtain a coarse-grained description of the given DNA string in terms of a smaller set of distinct domain labels. This yields a minimal domain description of a given DNA sequence, significantly reducing its organizational complexity. This procedure gives a new means of evaluating genomic complexity as one examines organisms ranging from bacteria to human. The mosaic organization of DNA sequences could have originated from the insertion of fragments of one genome (the parasite) inside another (the host), and we present numerical experiments that are suggestive of this scenario.