Global Description of Amino Acid & Nucleotide Sequences: Application to Predicting Protein Folds, Intron-Exon Discrimination, & RNA Gene Identification

General global sequence descriptors have been developed which proved to be widely applicable to the prediction of properties of biological genes and gene products. These descriptors include composition, transition, and distribution of defined attributes in the amino acid or nucleotide sequence. We have tested this approach on three completely distinct biological problems: 1) prediction of protein three-dimensional folds; 2) discrimination between sequences of gene introns and exons; and 3) identification of putative RNA genes in genomic sequences.