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

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 proposedmethod therefore improves the likelihood of correctly identifying coding regions in such genes.