Research on the Repeated Sequences among tRNA Sequences

Abstract

Many theories thought that present-day tRNA sequences evolved from some short RNA hairpins which contain a simple stem-loop structure. To find out these significant fragment sequences, the repeated sequences of different length within 3420 tRNA sequences are counted and analyzed. The results show that: 1) the probability of occurrence P(i) with the given repeated sequences i follows a power-law distribution when the length K of repeated sequences is longer than four bases, and in this case, the total number N(n) of occurrence with the repeated times n follows a power-law distribution too; 2) the sequence of the length K which repeats the largest times is just only sequence of the length K-b wobbling b bases on its left or right side (b varies between 1 and K-1); 3) the same repeated sequences are found nearly at the identical site in different tRNA sequences as the length K of repeated sequences is longer than five bases. Then a hypothesis of the origin and evolution mechanisms of tRNA sequences is proposed and discussed.