Complex Morlet Wavelet Analysis of the DNA Frequency Chaos Game Signal and Revealing Specific Motifs of Introns in C.elegans

Abstract: Nowadays, studying introns is becoming a very promising field in the genomics. Even though they play a role in the dynamic regulation of gene and in the organism's evolution, introns have not attracted enough attention like exons did; especially of digital signal processing researchers. Thus, we focus on analysis of the C.elegans introns. In this paper, we propose the complex Morlet wavelet analysis to investigate introns' characterization in the C.elegans genes. However, catching the change in frequency response with respect to time of the gene sequences is hindered by their presence in the form of strings of characters. This can only be counteracted by assigning numerical values to each of the DNA characters. This operation defines the so called "DNA coding approach". In this context, we propose a new coding technique based on the Frequency Chaos Game Representation (FCGR) that we name the "Frequency Chaos Game Signal" (FCGS). Results of the complex Morlet wavelet Analysis applied to the Celegans FCGS are showing a very distinguished texture. The visual interpretation of the colour scalograms is proved to be an efficient tool for revealing significant information about intronic sequences.