Performance of GENSCAN

Performance of GENSCAN has been compared to that of other computer programs written for gene finding. The Burset/Guigo set of 570 vertebrate multi-exon gene sequences [2] was used as the test set. The results (as reported in [2]) have been quite encouraging. Both at the nucleotide level as well as the exon-level, GENSCAN's accuracy has been significantly better that other programs.
Important features of GENSCAN include

• Identification of complete intron/exon structures of a gene in genomic DNA.
• Ability to predict multiple genes and to deal with partial as well as complete genes.
• Ability to predict consistent sets of genes occurring on either or both strands of the DNA.

  

Figure 7.11: Accuracy of GENSCAN for different signal and exon types.

  

Figure 7.12: GENSCAN results.

Although the results are good they are still not good enough for massive gene finding. GENSCAN has 80% chance of detecting an exon. If a gene has more then one exon the probability of correctly detecting all of them declines rapidly.