Investigation of coding structure in DNA

We have all heard the term "cracking the genomic code", but is DNA a code in the information theoretic sense? The coined term "genetic code" maps nucleotide triplets (codons) to amino acids. However, this is in a computer coding sense because a codon instruction is performed to output an amino acid sequence. We examine methods to detect redundant coding structures in DNA. First, a finite field framework for a nucleotide symbolic sequence is presented; then approaches to finding the sequence structure associated with error correcting codes are examined. We compare a previously proposed parity-check vector search method to a novel subspace partitioning algorithm. The subspace partitioning algorithm is a general approach to finding any linear coding redundancy. Our method provides an easy way of visualizing coding potential in DNA sequences as shown from the test data.