Recognition of 3'-processing sites of human mRNA precursors.

We have developed a computer program POLYAH and an algorithm for the identification of 3'-processing sites of human mRNA precursors. The algorithm is based on a linear discriminant function (LDF) trained to discriminate real poly(A) signal regions from the other regions of human genes possessing the AATAAA sequence which is most likely non-functional. As the parameters of LDF, various significant contextual characteristics of sequences surrounding AATAAA signals were used. An accuracy of method has been estimated on a set of 131 poly(A) regions and 1466 regions of human genes having the AATAAA sequence. When the threshold was set to predict 86% of poly(A) regions correctly, specificity of 51% and correlation coefficient of 0.62 had been achieved. The precision of this approach is better than for the other methods and has been tested on a larger data set. POLYAH can be used through World Wide Web (at Gene-Finder Home page: URL http:@dot.imgen.bcm.tmc.edu:9331/gene-finder/ gf.html) or by sending files with uncharacterized human sequences to the University of Houston or Weizmann Institute of Science e-mail servers.