Analysis of Gene Translation Using a Communications Theory Approach

Abstract

Rapid advances in both genomic data acquisition and computational technology have encouraged the development and use of advanced engineering methods in the field of bioinformatics and computational genomics. Processes in molecular biology can be modeled through the use of these methods. Such processes include identification and annotation of all the functional elements in the genome, including genes and regulatory sequences, which are a fundamental challenge in genomics and computational biology. Since regulatory elements are often short and variable, their identification and discovery using computational algorithms is difficult. However, significant advances have been made in the computational methods for modeling and detection of DNA regulatory elements. This paper proposes a novel use of techniques and principles from communications engineering, coding, and information theory for modeling, identification, and analysis of genomic regulatory elements and biological sequences. The methods proposed are not only able to identify regulatory elements (REs) at their exact locations, but can also “interestingly” distinguish coding from non-coding regions. Therefore, the proposed methods can be utilized to identify genes in the mRNA sequence.