STATISTICAL CORRELATION OF NUCLEOTIDES IN A DNA-SEQUENCE

We review methods in the study of nucleotide correlation in DNA sequen ce, and demonstrate two basic properties of the correlation through st atistical analysis, namely, the short-range dominance of nucleotide co rrelation in most DNA sequences and the coarse-grained evolutionary de pendence of the short-range correlation in coding sequences. A corresp onding evolutionary mechanism is suggested. By the use of spectral ana lysis a large inhomogeneity in long-range base correlations for differ ent sequences is indicated. Some results on three-dimensional DNA walk s are reported. The linguistic differences between coding and noncodin g sequences are also indicated.