Prediction of nucleosome positions in the yeast genome based on matched mirror position filtering

Nucleosome positioning can affect the accessibility of the underlying DNA to the nuclear environment and as such plays an essential role in the regulation of cellular processes. Specific patterns have been found in the underlying DNA sequences of the nucleosome, and one of the most important patterns includes dinucleotides distributed every 10 to 11 base pairs. Based on this property, we propose to match each dinucleotide in the sequence against its mirror occurrences for 10 to 11 base pairs on both left-hand and right-hand sides. A large number of matches in a local region will then signify the existence of a nucleosome. In this paper, we propose the matched mirror position filters for efficient matching of periodic dinucleotide patterns and computationally predict the nucleosome positions. Experimental results on the Saccharomyces cerevisiae (yeast) genome show that the proposed algorithm can predict nucleosome positions effectively. More than 50% of our predicted nucleosomes are within 35 base pairs of those detected by biological experiments.