GRAIL - A MULTIAGENT NEURAL-NETWORK SYSTEM FOR GENE IDENTIFICATION

Identifying genes within large regions of uncharacterized DNA is a dif ficult undertaking and is currently the focus of many research efforts . We describe a gene localization and modeling system, called GRAIL. G RAIL is a multiple sensor-neural network-based system. It localizes ge nes in anonymous DNA sequences by recognizing features related to prot ein-coding regions and the boundaries of coding regions, and then comb ines the recognized features using a neutral network system. Localized coding regions are then ''optimally'' parsed into a gene model. Throu gh years of extensive testing, GRAIL consistently localizes about 90% of coding portions test genes with a false positive rate of about 10%. A number of genes for major genetic diseases have been located throug h the use of GRAIL, and over 1000 research laboratories worldwide use GRAIL on regular bases for localization of genes on their newly sequen ced DNA.