Lacunarity analysis of genomic sequences: A potential bio-sequence analysis method

This paper proposes the use of lacunarity analysis of genomic sequences as a potential bio-sequence analysis method. In the present work the fractal property of DNA sequences is confirmed using the lacunarity analysis of their Chaos Game Representation matrices. In another study, the distribution of various n-mers in a genomic sequence is investigated based on the lacunarity analysis of one-dimensional representation of the indicator sequences of n-mers. One key finding from this study is that stop codon distribution in a genomic sequence, both in prokaryotes as well as eukaryotes, follows a random pattern. Another interesting result out of the present investigations is that lacunarity plot of the indicator sequence of repeating blocks in a tandem repeat sequence follows a similar pattern that of a one dimensional clustered data. This result demonstrates the use of lacunarity analysis in finding the presence of repeated sequences in a genomic sequence. All the results obtained clearly point to the power of lacunarity analysis of genomic sequences as a potential sequence analysis method.