Binary particle swarm optimization for operon prediction

An operon is a fundamental unit of transcription and contains specific functional genes for the construction and regulation of networks at the entire genome level. The correct prediction of operons is vital for understanding gene regulations and functions in newly sequenced genomes. As experimental methods for operon detection tend to be nontrivial and time consuming, various methods for operon prediction have been proposed in the literature. In this study, a binary particle swarm optimization is used for operon prediction in bacterial genomes. The intergenic distance, participation in the same metabolic pathway, the cluster of orthologous groups, the gene length ratio and the operon length are used to design a fitness function. We trained the proper values on the Escherichia coli genome, and used the above five properties to implement feature selection. Finally, our study used the intergenic distance, metabolic pathway and the gene length ratio property to predict operons. Experimental results show that the prediction accuracy of this method reached 92.1%, 93.3% and 95.9% on the Bacillus subtilis genome, the Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA01 genome and the Staphylococcus aureus genome, respectively. This method has enabled us to predict operons with high accuracy for these three genomes, for which only limited data on the properties of the operon structure exists.