Fractal dimension of exon and intron sequences.

In this paper, the concept of fractal is applied to describe the features of nucleotide sequences. We introduce the mapping from nucleotide sequences to two-dimensional metric space. Then we use this mapping to study quantitatively the self-similarity of exon and intron sequences in different scales. We find that self-similarity exists in the geometrical range and main range of a nucleotide sequence and define the fractal dimension in these ranges. The results show that the fractal properties of exon sequences are quite different from those of introns, reflecting their difference in structure and function. The fractal dimension of the geometrical range may be used to predict the exon regions of a raw nucleotide sequence.