Human-chimpanzee alignment: Ortholog Exponentials and Paralog Power Laws

Genomic subsequences conserved between closely related species such as human and chimpanzee exhibit an exponential length distribution, in contrast to the algebraic length distribution observed for sequences shared between distantly related genomes. We find that the former exponential can be further decomposed into an exponential component primarily composed of orthologous sequences, and a truncated algebraic component primarily composed of paralogous sequences.