A DSP perspective to the period-3 detection problem

Many signal processing techniques have been introduced in the past to identify the protein coding regions by detecting the so-called period-3 component in the DNA spectrum. However, a solid understanding of this observed phenomenon and its underlying mechanism from a DSP perspective has been missing from the literature. We therefore propose a novel DSP model that i) clearly explains the intricate operation of the DNA spectrum, ii) allows the derivation of new DNA spectrum expressions which, in turn, generalize and unify previous work and iii) suggests an efficient way to improve the detection of protein coding regions by computing a filtered spectrum.