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Discriminating coding, non-coding and regulatory regions using rescaled range and detrended fluctuation analysis

<28> The identification of regulatory regions is an essential, but still problematical step to obtain a deeper understanding of the regulation of genes. This study shows that fractal dimensionality, as an alternative measurement of structural complexity, offers a powerful way to distinguish regulatory regions from other functional parts of the genome (e.g. protein-coding DNA). Instead of the conventional assumption of serial stationarity of the nucleotide sequence, it exploits the fact that such homogeneity is often absent to distinguish regulatory from coding and non-coding, non-regulatory DNA.