Species independence of mutual information in coding and noncoding DNA.

We explore if there exist universal statistical patterns that are different in coding and noncoding DNA and can be found in all living organisms, regardless of their phylogenetic origin. We find that (i) the mutual information function [symbol: see text] has a significantly different functional form in coding and noncoding DNA. We further find that (ii) the probability distributions of the average mutual information [symbol: see text] are significantly different in coding and noncoding DNA, while (iii) they are almost the same for organisms of all taxonomic classes. Surprisingly, we find that [symbol: see text] is capable of predicting coding regions as accurately as organism-specific coding measures.