Hidden ancient repeats in DNA: Mapping and quantification

• Text segmentation technique is applied to detect hidden ancient repeats.
• Minimal estimate of 35.5% is made for the sequences originated from simple repeats.
• Protein coding sequences contain hidden tandem repeats of unit lengths multiple of 3.
• Hidden tandem repeats in eucaryotic sequences have a variety of repeat unit lengths.

We have shown, in a previous paper, that tandem repeating sequences, especially triplet repeats, play a very important role in gene evolution. This result led to the formulation of the following hypothesis: most of the genomic sequences evolved through everlasting acts of tandem repeat expansions with subsequent accumulation of changes. In order to estimate how much of the observed sequences have the repeat origin we describe the adaptation of a text segmentation algorithm, based on dynamic programming, to the mapping of the ancient expansion events. The algorithm maximizes the segmentation cost, calculated as the similarity of obtained fragments to the putative repeat sequence. In the first application of the algorithm to segmentations of genomic sequences, a significant difference between the natural sequences and the corresponding shuffled sequences is detected. The natural fragments are longer and more similar to the putative repeat sequences. As our analysis shows, the coding sequences allow for repeats only when the size of the repeated words is divisible by three. In contrast, in the non-coding sequences, all repeated word sizes are present. It was estimated, that in Escherichia coli K12 genome, about 35.5% of sequence can be detectably traced to original simple repeat ancestors. The results shed light on the genomic sequence organization, and strongly confirm the hypothesis about the crucial role of triplet expansions in gene origin and evolution.