Hardware Accelerator for Prediction of Exons

Gene annotation is by nature a computationally intensive problem, as it needs to process huge data size of DNA sequences. This forces the need to look for alternate ways of implementing algorithms to predict exons. The paper presents an accelerator for indexing DNA sequences. The accelerator effectively exploits the 3-periodicity property exhibited by protein coding regions and indicates their presence in the sequence. Experimental results show superior performance compared with software-based approach for evaluating exons from DNA. The accelerator based PCI pluggable card offers a great utility to scientists and engineers actively involved in indexing DNA sequences