A Fourier characteristic of coding sequences: origins and a non-Fourier approximation

Abstract

The 3-base periodicity, identified as a pronounced peak at the frequency N/3 (N is the length of the DNA sequence) of the Fourier power spectrum of protein coding regions, is used as a marker in gene-finding algorithms to distinguish protein coding regions (exons) and noncoding regions (introns) of genomes. In this paper, we reveal the explanation of this phenomenon which results from a nonuniform distribution of nucleotides in the three coding positions. There is a linear correlation between the nucleotide distributions in the three codon positions and the power spectrum at the frequency N/3. Furthermore, this study indicates the relationship between the length of a DNA sequence and the variance of nucleotide distributions and the average Fourier power spectrum, which is the noise signal in gene-finding methods. The results presented in this paper provide an efficient way to compute the Fourier power spectrum at N/3 and the noise signal in gene-finding methods by calculating the nucleotide distributions in the three codon positions.