Universal power law behaviors in genomic sequences and evolutionary models.

We study the length distribution of a particular class of DNA sequences known as the 5' untranslated regions exons. These exons belong to the messenger RNA of protein coding genes, but they are not coding (they are located upstream of the coding portion of the mRNA) and are thus less constrained from an evolutionary point of view. We show that in both mice and humans these exons show a very clean power law decay in their length distribution and suggest a simple evolutionary model, which may explain this finding. We conjecture that this power law behavior could indeed be a general feature of higher eukaryotes.