Abstract
A new method for combining protein motif dictionary to gene finding system is proposed. The system consists of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and a dictionary. The HMMs represents the nucleotide acid bases, the codons, and the amino acids. The ‘words’ in the dictionary is described by the sequence of these HMMs and represent the noncoding regions, the codons, protein motifs, tRNA regions and signals in DNA sequences. The statistics between these regions are expressed by the “grammar”, which is a stochastic network of the ‘words’.
Using the same kind of technique of speech recognition by HMMs with a word dictionary and a grammar, the stochastic network of ‘words’ enables the motif dictionary to be used during the parsing of the DNA sequences. At the same time, the information of the di-codon statistics, which are known as the important parameters, is included in the stochastic network. As a result, while the system parses DNA sequences and finds the coding regions, the protein motifs are automatically annotated in the regions. It helps to identify the functions of the genes and reduces the cost of homology search for each hypothetical coding regions. This method is different from simply using the the information of homology search. This method uses the information of the motif patterns during the parsing process, but searching the motif patterns after/before finding the coding regions cannot directly affect the parsing process itself. Experimental results have shown that this method correctly finds and annotates the motifs in the coding regions in the DNA sequence of cyanobacterium.
