We have used a “Perceptron” algorithm to find a weighting function which distinguishes E . coli translational initiation sites from all other sites in a library of over 78,000 nucleotides of mRNA sequence. The “Perceptron” examined sequences as linear representations. The “Perceptron” is more successful at finding gene beginnings than our previous searches using “rules” (see previous paper). We note that the weighting function can find translational initiation sites within sequences that were not included in the training set.

Use of the ‘Perceptron’ algorithm to distinguish translational initiation sites inE. coli