Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Department of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram – 695581, Kerala, India; ²Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Calicut - 673601, Kerala, India; ³Faculty of Science, Kuwait University, P. O. Box: 5969, SAFAT: 13060, Kuwait

Email

toumesh@gmail.com; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received March 12, 2014; Revised March 17, 2014; Accepted March 18, 2014; Published April 23, 2014

Identification of promoters in DNA sequence using computational techniques is a significant research area because of its direct association in transcription regulation. A wide range of algorithms are available for promoter prediction. Most of them are polymerase dependent and cannot handle eukaryotes and prokaryotes alike. This study proposes a polymerase independent algorithm, which can predict whether a given DNA fragment is a promoter or not, based on the sequence features and statistical elements. This algorithm considers all possible pentamers formed from the nucleotides A, C, G, and T along with CpG islands, TATA box, initiator elements, and downstream promoter elements. The highlight of the algorithm is that it is not polymerase specific and can predict for both eukaryotes and prokaryotes in the same computational manner even though the underlying biological mechanisms of promoter recognition differ greatly. The proposed Method, Promoter Prediction System - PPS-CBM achieved a sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy percentages of 75.08, 83.58 and 79.33 on E. coli data set and 86.67, 88.41 and 87.58 on human data set. We have developed a tool based on PPS-CBM, the proposed algorithm, with which multiple sequences of varying lengths can be tested simultaneously and the result is reported in a comprehensive tabular format. The tool also reports the strength of the prediction.  

Availability

The tool and source code of PPS-CBM is available at http://keralabs.org.

Citation

Umesh et al.   Bioinformation 10(4): 175-179 (2014)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.