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Chapter 10
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0914-1.ch010
ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the use of fuzzy set theory and intuitionistic fuzzy set theory in DNA sequence
comparison. It also shows an indirect application of fuzzy set theory in comparing protein sequences.
In fact, protein sequences consist of 20 amino acids. The chapter shows how such amino acids can be
classifed in six diferent groups. These groups are obtained purely from theoretical considerations. These
are entirely diferent from the known groups of amino acids based on biological considerations. Also it
is known how these classifed groups of amino acids help in protein sequence comparison. The results
of comparison difer as the groups difer in number and their compositions. Naturally it is expected that
newer results of comparison will come out from such newer classifed groups of amino acids obtained
theoretically. Thus fuzzy set theory is also useful in protein sequence comparison.
INTRODUCTION
This chapter highlights the importance of fuzzy set theory and intuitionistic fuzzy set theory in problems
of Bioinformatics. Initially the standard Voss numerical representation of Nucleotides is interpreted
by a two valued logic. While generalizing it to a polynucleotide or a whole genome, it is shown how
the notion of fuzzy logic comes into play and helps in obtaining their representations finally on a 12
dimensional unit hypercube. Naturally the set of poly-nucleotides or of whole genomes may be thought
of as forming a metric space under suitable metric. The metric defined this way helps in comparison of
DNA sequences. Sometimes the comparison is found to be unsatisfactory. This is compensated by us-
ing intuitionistic fuzzy set theory in place of fuzzy set theory and adopting same procedure as in fuzzy
Use of Fuzzy Set Theory in
DNA Sequence Comparison
and Amino Acid Classifcation
Subhram Das
Narula Institute of Technology, India
Soumen Ghosh
Narula Institute of Technology, India
Jayanta Pal
Narula Institute of Technology, India
Dilip K. Bhattacharya
University of Calcutta, India