Investigating DNA words and their distributions across the tree of life.

ABSTRACT: The frequency distributions of DNA k-mers are shaped by fundamental biological processes and offer a window into genome structure and evolution. Inspired by analogies to natural language, prior studies have attempted to model genomic k-mer usage using Zipf's law, a rank-frequency law originally formulated for words in human language. However, the extent to which this law accurately captures the distribution of k-mers across diverse species remains unclear. Here, we systematically analyze k-mer frequency spectra across more than 225,000 genome assemblies spanning all three domains of life and viruses. We demonstrate that Zipf's law consistently underperforms in modeling k-mer distributions. In contrast, we propose the truncated power law and Zipf-Mandelbrot distributions, which provide subs

SUBMITTER: Koilakos C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12686733 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature