3 ms·
Imagine if, for any given position in a list, there were only 4 values allowed: A T G C What is the value of the next item in the list? Pure guessing and y
by lkrubner 15y ago
Imagine if, for any given position in a list, there were only 4 values allowed:
A
T
G
C
What is the value of the next item in the list? Pure guessing and you have a 25% chance of being right. But what if a review of past lists allows you to develop weighted averages, to the point where you could be, say, 70% correct? What if there was a way to do multiple scans, such that the chance of correctness gets to be some value of 99.x% ?
Imagine the 4 values stand for:
Adenine
Thymine
Guanine
Cytosine
It seems to me there is here suggested a new way of parsing a genome. I have friends who've worked on automated cancer detection based on recognizing certain patters in photos of cells. Possibly similar techniques could take electron microscope scans and figure out a sequence of DNA?
- ArbitraryLimits 15y agoWell, this is actually the old way of parsing a genome. What you've described is essentially a Hidden Markov Model with discrete states, which is the bread and butter of genome sequencing.
- a1k0n 15y agoI'm actually curious about that distribution; could you gain compression efficiency by grouping them into 3-base-pair codons? Or is DNA pretty much random at the base-pair level and the codon redundancy makes it actually work anyway?