Compositional heterogeneity within, and uniformity between, DNA sequences of yeast chromosomes

Abstract

The heterogeneity within, and similarities between, yeast chromosomes are studied. For the former, we show by the size distribution of domains, coding density, size distribution of open reading frames, spatial power spectra, and deviation from binomial distribution for C + G% in large moving windows that there is a strong deviation of the yeast sequences from random sequences. For the latter, not only do we graphically illustrate the similarity for the above mentioned statistics, but we also carry out a rigorous analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. The hypothesis that all yeast chromosomes are similar cannot be rejected by this test. We examine the two possible explanations of this interchromosomal uniformity: a common origin, such as genome-wide duplication (polyploidization), and a concerted evolutionary process.