Identification of Start Codons

This chapter begins with an extremely brief review of cell biology and the concept of DNA transcription. The purpose is to understand the existence of start codons and the potential qualities of the DNA before the start codon. Then a simplistic Hidden Markov Model is constructed to predict whether a DNA string of ATG is a start codon or not. The simulation uses multiple bacterial genomes to test this theory. The outputs, which replicate published results, indicate that this simple Hidden Markov Model could provide evidence to determining the nature of an ATG sequence. This is successfully applied to many bacterial genomes.