Applying signal theory to the analysis of biomolecules

MOTIVATION The accumulation of sequence-related and other biological data for basic research and application purposes invites disaster. It appears very likely that neither traditional thinking nor current technologies (including their foreseeable evolutionary developments) will be able to cope with this ever intensifying situation. RESULTS We present the detailed theoretical background for applying signal theory, as known from speech recognition and image analysis, to the analysis of biomolecules. The general scheme is as follows: biochemical and biophysical properties of biomolecules are used to model an n-dimensional signal which represents the entire information-bearing biomolecule. Such signals are used to search for biological principles, analogies or similarities between biomolecules. In a series of simple experiments (bacterial DNA, generation of real signals using melting enthalpies, detection filtering by convolution of signals) we have shown that the novel system for comparative analysis of the properties of information-bearing biomolecules works as in theory. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION http://genome.gbf.de/wavepaper.