Abstract

DNA sequence analysis is of great significance for increasing our understanding of genomic functions. An important task facing us is the exploration of hidden structural information stored in the DNA sequence. This paper introduces a DNA structure-based adaptive wavelet transform (WT) – the bionic wavelet transform (BWT) – for DNA sequence analysis. The symbolic DNA sequence can be separated into four channels of indicator sequences. An adaptive symbol-to-number mapping, determined from the structural feature of the DNA sequence, was introduced into WT. It can adjust the weight value of each channel to maximise the useful energy distribution of the whole BWT output. The performance of the proposed BWT was examined by analysing synthetic and real DNA sequences. Results show that BWT performs better than traditional WT in presenting greater energy distribution. This new BWT method should be useful for the detection of the latent structural features in future DNA sequence analysis.