What are the pyknons?
Using an unsupervised pattern-discovery method, the human intergenic and intronic regions were processed and all variable-length patterns with identically conserved copies and multiplicities above what is expected by chance were catalogued. Among the millions of discovered patterns, a subset of 127,998 patterns was found, termed pyknons, which have additional nonoverlapping instances in the untranslated and protein-coding regions of 30,675 transcripts from 20,059 human genes. The pyknons arrange combinatorially in the untranslated and coding regions of numerous human genes where they form mosaics. Pyknons might represent a biologically important link between coding and non-coding DNA.