A method of precise mRNA/DNA homology-based gene structure prediction

BACKGROUND: Accurate and automatic gene finding and structural prediction is a common problem in bioinformatics, and applications need to be capable of handling non-canonical splice sites, micro-exons and partial gene structure predictions that span across several genomic clones. RESULTS: We present a mRNA/DNA homology based gene structure prediction tool, GIGOgene. We use a new affine gap penalty splice-enhanced global alignment algorithm running in linear memory for a high quality annotation of splice sites. Our tool includes a novel algorithm to assemble partial gene structure predictions using interval graphs. GIGOgene exhibited a sensitivity of 99.08% and a specificity of 99.98% on the Genie learning set, and demonstrated a higher quality of gene structural prediction when compared to Sim4, est2genome, Spidey, Galahad and BLAT, including when genes contained micro-exons and non-canonical splice sites. GIGOgene showed an acceptable loss of prediction quality when confronted with a noisy Genie learning set simulating ESTs. CONCLUSION: GIGOgene shows a higher quality of gene structure prediction for mRNA/DNA spliced alignment when compared to other available tools.