Why does alphabet-based compression algorithm Lempel-Ziv exhibit decreased compression ratios on highly repetitive DNA sequences compared to protein sequences?

💡 Explanation

The Lempel-Ziv algorithm relies on identifying repeating patterns. Because the DNA alphabet (A, T, C, G) is much smaller than the protein alphabet (20 amino acids), repetitive sequences saturate the algorithm's dictionary quickly, therefore new patterns cannot be encoded efficiently, rather than using a diverse alphabet enabling further compression.

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