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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 29: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems II (joint session BP/DY)

BP 29.5: Talk

Thursday, March 21, 2024, 10:45–11:00, H 1028

Complex and 3-dimensional RNA random walks: comparison and application to sequence data across biological taxa — •Jack Mortimer and Jens Christian Claussen — School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

The DNA random walk is a classical attempt to grasp long-range features of DNA (or RNA) sequences by mapping pairs of amino acids to ± 1 steps of a random walk, and interpret the resulting “time series” by scaling analysis [1]. But as four letters C,G,A,T comprise the DNA alphabet it is a straightforward idea to utilize complex numbers to exploit this information (rather than ignoring it). This direction has been investigated also elsewhere [2] but different definitions were used, and it is not yet conclusive how far biological data can be differentiated.

In this contribution, we attempt a comparison of different complex RW definitions together with a 3D RW, discuss their relations between each other, and apply them to a wide range of DNA sequences. While the various DNA RW’s seem not to be directly disciminatory for each species, we find that they provide a wide spread across the datasets. In conclusion, complex and higher-dimensional DNA random walks are a promising tool to extract long-range features from DNA, although the biological interpretation of this method remains to be investigated.
[1] Peng, Buldyrev, Goldberger et al., Nature 356,168 (1992)
[2] Cattani, in: Bioinf Res Dev, Springer, p. 528 (2008)

Keywords: DNA; Multiscale analysis; Bioinformatics; Random Walk; RNA