Digital Signal Processing Techniques in the Analysis of DNA/RNA and Protein Sequences

This report investigates the possibility of using signal processing techniques in the analysis of biological sequences: DNA, RNA and proteins. The starting point in the investigation was the Resonant Recognition Model (RRM) and the method proposed here builds on the foundations set by RRM. However, some fundamental modi...cations to RRM had to be madein order to make it suitable for the analysis of a greater variety of sequences. The concepts were tested on the problem of promoter recognition. During the course of the project, several methods for extracting the features from the spectra of biological sequences and several types of classi...ers were tested. For promoter classi...cation the suitable choices were found to be Principal Component Analysis (PCA) feature extraction and General Regression Neural Network (GRNN) classi...er. Promoter recognition system designed around this classi...er showed very good performance in comparison to other promoter recognition tools. Results indicate that signal processing methods may be very suitable for analyzing biological sequences. Research Head: Professor Anthony D. Broadhurst Title: Chairman of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering