FRACTAL LANDSCAPES IN BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS

The purpose of this opening talk is to describe an example of recent progress in applying fractal concepts to biological systems. We first briefly review several biological systems, and then focus on the fractal features characterized by the long-range correlations found recently in DNA sequences containing non-coding material. We also discuss the evidence supporting the finding that for sequences containing only coding regions, there are no long-range correlations. Finally, we discuss the finding that the exponent α characterizing the long-range correlations increases with evolution.