Characterizing exons and introns by regularity of nucleotide strings.

Background: Translation of nucleotides into a numeric form has been approached in many ways and has allowed researchers to investigate the properties of protein-coding sequences and noncoding sequences. Typically, more pronounced long-range correlations and increased regularity were found in intron-containing genes and in non-transcribed regulatory DNA sequences, compared to cDNA sequences or intron-less genes. The regularity is assessed by spectral tools defined on numerical translates.