Identification of microsatellites in DNA sequence based on S-transform

Abstract

Microsatellites, or short tandem repeats (STRs), belong to the category of DNA tandem repeats which are present in all genomes with a size of 1 to 6 base-pairs. They are useful in several research domains such as population studies and DNA fingerprinting. They are also the cause of diverse genetic diseases. Thus, it's important to characterize and define them. Bioinformatics tools still deficient in this field because they demand a prior knowledge of repeat. Things which cannot be always available in databases. Signal and image processing scientists looked up for more efficient methods to remediate to these tool's limits. In this paper, we investigate microsatellites’ characterization in the DNA sequence using a new modification on the S-Transform (ST) analysis applied on the PNUC coding. To study further about the contribution of our method in the detection of STRs, a comparison with different methods including bioinformatics tools (TRF, Mreps, Etandem, AST, PSE, EMWD and Parametric) is established.