Disorder and Power-law Tails of DNA Sequence Self-Alignment   Concentrations in Molecular Evolution
  The self-alignment concentrations, $c(x)$, as functions of the length, $x$, of the identically matching maximal segments in the genomes of a variety of species, typically present power-law tails extending to the largest scales, i.e., $c(x) \propto x^{\alpha}$, with similar or apparently different negative $\alpha$s ($<-2$). The relevant fundamental processes of molecular evolution are segmental duplication and point mutation, and that recently the stick fragmentation phenomenology has been used to account the neutral evolution. However, disorder is intrinsic to the evolution system and, by freezing it in time (quenching) for the setup of a simple fragmentation model, we obtain decaying, steady-state and the general full time-dependent solutions, all $\propto x^{\alpha}$ for $x\to \infty$, which is in contrast to the only power-law solution, $x^{-3}$ for $x\to 0$ of the pure model (without disorder). %Other algebraic terms may dominate at intermediate scales, which seems to be confirmed by some species, such as rice. We also present self-alignment results showing more than one scaling regimes, consistent with the theoretical results of the existence of more than one algebraic terms which dominate at different regimes. 
Kun Gao, HongGuang Sun, Jian-Zhou Zhu
q-bio.PE physics.bio-ph q-bio.GN