Complexity of Mitochondrial Genome Sequences

by Brandon Toun

Submitted : Spring 2012

The purpose of this project is to compare the complexities of different species’ mitochondrial genome sequences. Mitochondria are organelles that produce adenosoine triphosphate (ATP), an energy source for the rest of the cell. Using an implementation of Deflate compression algorithm from Java standard library, we were able to compress mitochondrial genomes of nine different species. The complexity of each sequence is estimated as a ratio of the original sequence length to the length of the compressed sequence. In addition, we show how a notion of topological entropy from symbolic dynamics can be used as another complexity measure of nucleotide sequence.

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