Thermodynamics exploration to identify donor sites for yeast

The exact identification of splice sites is a major functional sequence mapping task. The interaction between pre-mRNA splice sites and snRNAs suggests that thermodynamic models could provide methods for identifying splice sites. We show that the donor site position can be identified by finding the minimum binding energy calculated between a mask \´3\´-CAUACA-5" and the pre-mRNA in this paper. The test on the sample data set, for which 38 out 42 genes were correctly predicted, shows that thermodynamics plays an important role in the location of donor sites for yeast. Furthermore, the similarity of the pre-mRNA splicing process among eukaryotic species suggests that the thermodynamic splice site identification model may be applicable for other species.