Backtranslation is the process of decoding a sequence of amino acids into the corresponding codons. All synthetic gene design systems include a backtranslation module. The degeneracy of the genetic code makes backtranslation potentially ambiguous since most amino acids are encoded by multiple codons. The common approach to overcome this difficulty is based on imitation of codon usage within the target species.  EasyBack is a new parameter-free, fully-automated software for backtranslation using Hidden Markov Models. EasyBack is not based on imitation of codon usage within the target species, but instead uses a sequence-similarity criterion. The prediction quality of a protein backtranslation methis markedly increased by replacing the criterion of most used codon in the same species with a Hidden Markov Model trained with a set of most similar sequences from all species. Moreover, the proposed method allows the quality of prediction to be estimated probabilistically.

This tool has been eveloped with other Autors as a research project at University of Catania.

EasyBack is supported by StudioPigola on all editions of Windows 10.

REFERENCES

• 2007 A. Ferro, R. Giugno, G. Pigola, A. Pulvirenti, C. Di Pietro, M. Purrello, M. Ragusa, “Sequence similarity is more relevant than species specificity in probabilistic backtranslation”, BMC Bioinformatics 8 : 58, 2007. DOI:10.1186/1471-2105-8-58