Telling apartFelidaeandUrsidaefrom the distribution of nucleotides in mitochondrial DNA

Abstract

Rank–frequency distributions of nucleotide sequences in mitochondrial DNA are defined in a way analogous to the linguistic approach, with the highest-frequent nucleobase serving as a whitespace. For such sequences, entropy and mean length are calculated. These parameters are shown to discriminate the species of the Felidae (cats) and Ursidae (bears) families. From purely numerical values we are able to see in particular that giant pandas are bears while koalas are not. The observed linear relation between the parameters is explained using a simple probabilistic model. The approach based on the non-additive generalization of the Bose distribution is used to analyze the frequency spectra of the nucleotide sequences. In this case, the separation of families is not very sharp. Nevertheless, the distributions for Felidae have on average longer tails comparing to Ursidae.