DSP in genomics: processing and frequency-domain analysis of character strings

We demonstrate that digital signal processing of biomolecular sequences provides powerful approaches for solving highly relevant problems in bioinformatics by properly mapping character strings into numerical sequences. As examples, we show that color spectrograms visually provide, in the form of local texture, significant information about biomolecular sequences, thus facilitating understanding of local nature, structure and function; we provide an optimization procedure predicting protein-coding regions in DNA sequences including reading frame and coding direction, using both the magnitude and the phase of properly defined Fourier transforms; and we present a digital filtering approach to the process of translating nucleic acids into proteins. These approaches result in alternative mathematical formulations and often provide improved computational techniques for the solution of useful problems in genomic information science and technology