A three-state model for DNA protein-coding regions.

It is known that the protein-coding regions of DNA are usually characterized by a three-base periodicity. In this paper, we exploit this property, studying a DNA model based on three deterministic states, where each state implements a finite-context model. The experimental results obtained confirm the appropriateness of the proposed approach, showing compression gains in relation to the single finite-context model counterpart. Additionally, and potentially more interesting than the compression gain on its own, is the observation that the entropy associated to each of the three base positions of a codon differs and that this variation is not the same among the organisms analyzed.