EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2004 (2004), Issue 1, Pages 108-114
doi:10.1155/S1110865704309285

A Digital Signal Processing Method for Gene Prediction with Improved Noise Suppression

Trevor W. Fox1 and Alex Carreira2

1Research and Development Department, Intelligent Engines Corporation, 903 42 St. SW, Calgary T3C-1Y9, Alberta, Canada
2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive N.W., Calgary T2N 1N4, Alberta, Canada

Received 1 March 2003; Revised 15 September 2003

Abstract

It has been observed that the protein-coding regions of DNA sequences exhibit period-three behaviour, which can be exploited to predict the location of coding regions within genes. Previously, discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and digital filter-based methods have been used for the identification of coding regions. However, these methods do not significantly suppress the noncoding regions in the DNA spectrum at 2π/3. Consequently, a noncoding region may inadvertently be identified as a coding region. This paper introduces a new technique (a single digital filter operation followed by a quadratic window operation) that suppresses nearly all of the noncoding regions. The proposed method therefore improves the likelihood of correctly identifying coding regions in such genes.