Non-Coding Regions of Chloroplast Genomes Exhibit a Structuredness of Five Types

Abstract

We studied the statistical properties of non-coding regions of chloroplast genomes of 391 plants. To do that, each non-coding region has been tiled with a set of overlapping fragments of the same length, and those fragments were transformed into triplet frequency dictionaries. The dictionaries were clustered in 64-dimensional Euclidean space. Five types of the distributions were identified: ball, ball with tail, ball with two tails, lens with tail, and lens with two tails. Besides, the multigenome distribution has been studied: there are ten species performing an isolated and distant cluster; surprisingly, there is no immediate and simple relation in taxonomy composition of these clusters.