An Enhanced Method for Period-3 Based Exon and Gene Prediction

Identification of gene locations in a DNA sequence is one of the important problems in the area of genomics. Nucleotides in exons of a DNA sequence show f=1/3 periodicity. The period-3 property in exons of eukaryotic gene sequences enables signal processing based time-domain and frequency domain methods to predict these regions. Identification of the period-3 regions helps in predicting the gene locations within the billions long DNA sequence of eukaryotic cells. In this paper the DNA symbolic-to-numeric representations are presented and the existing methods of gene prediction are also discussed. Finally, an enhancement over the existing methods has been proposed that combines the features of two best existing computationally efficient methods namely, AMDF (Average Magnitude difference function) and the optimized method. The proposed method improves upon the existing methods in terms of gene prediction accuracy.