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

Copyright © 2004 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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.