Gene Expression Analysis Using Communications, Coding and Information Theory Based Models

Identification and annotation of all the functional elements in the genome, including genes and regulatory sequences, is 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 also “interestingly” can distinguish coding from no coding regions. Therefore, the proposed methods can be utilized to identify genes in the mRNA sequence.