  The problem of differentiating the informational content of coding (exons)
and non-coding (introns) regions of a DNA sequence is one of the central
problems of genomics. The introns are estimated to be nearly 95% of the DNA and
since they do not seem to participate in the process of transcription of
amino-acids, they have been termed "junk DNA." Although it is believed that the
non-coding regions in genomes have no role in cell growth and evolution,
demonstration that these regions carry useful information would tend to falsify
this belief. In this paper, we consider entropy as a measure of information by
modifying the entropy expression to take into account the varying length of
these sequences. Exons are usually much shorter in length than introns;
therefore the comparison of the entropy values needs to be normalized. A length
correction strategy was employed using randomly generated nucleonic base
strings built out of the alphabet of the same size as the exons under question.
Our analysis shows that introns carry nearly as much of information as exons,
disproving the notion that they do not carry any information. The entropy
findings of this paper are likely to be of use in further study of other
challenging works like the analysis of symmetry models of the genetic code.
