Extraction of Conservative Rules for Translation Initiation Site Prediction using Formal Concept Analysis

Abstract

The search for conservative features that define the translation and transcription processes used by cells to interpret and express their genetic information is one of the great challenges in the molecular biology. Each transcribed mRNA sequence has only one part translated into proteins, called Coding Sequence. The detection of this region is what motivates the search for conservative characteristics in an mRNA sequence. In eukaryotes, this region usually begins with the first occurrence of the sequence of three nucleotides, being Adenine, Uracil and Guanine, the nucleotide set that it is called Translation Initiation Site. One way to look for conservative rules that define this region is to use the formal concept analysis that can have implications that indicate a coexistence between the positions of the sequence with the presence of the translation start site. This paper analyze the use of this technique to extract conservative rules to predict the translation initiation site in eukaryotes.