Design and implementation of parallel algorithms for gene-finding

Finding genes unequivocally in DNA sequences is one of the key goals of the Human Genome project. The human genome is a 3 billion character long DNA sequence and is estimated to contain about 100000 genes. It has been shown by several biologists that genes in a DNA sequence satisfy certain special properties. We use a combination of these properties to design a serial algorithm for gene-finding. To speed up the process of finding genes in long DNA sequences (of the order of ⩾100000 characters), we design a parallel algorithm for gene-finding. We have implemented the parallel gene-finding algorithm on the CM-5 multicomputer as well as on a network of HP Apollo workstations under Parallel Virtual Machine software package. Experimental results indicate that our algorithms predict genes with reasonable accuracy