Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 132625, 12 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/132625
Research Article

Shannon Entropy Analysis of the Genome Code

Department of Electrical Engineering, Institute of Engineering of Polytechnic Porto, Rua Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida 431, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal

Received 24 February 2012; Revised 8 April 2012; Accepted 10 April 2012

Academic Editor: Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber

Copyright © 2012 J. A. Tenreiro Machado. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper studies the chromosome information of twenty five species, namely, mammals, fishes, birds, insects, nematodes, fungus, and one plant. A quantifying scheme inspired in the state space representation of dynamical systems is formulated. Based on this algorithm, the information of each chromosome is converted into a bidimensional distribution. The plots are then analyzed and characterized by means of Shannon entropy. The large volume of information is integrated by averaging the lengths and entropy quantities of each species. The results can be easily visualized revealing quantitative global genomic information.