Finite state machine approach for STOP codon detection during protein synthesis

STOP codon detection is an important problem in protein synthesis or DNA sequencing since it plays an important role in the identification of coding region where the genes are located in the sequence. In this paper, finite state machine based approach is proposed for STOP codon detection during protein synthesis. VHDL code is used to implement the design of the proposed method. Simulation studies for different sequences from GenBank were carried out using the proposed method and the results are presented. This approach not only detects the STOP codons but also provides a count of number of STOP codons in a given sequence irrespective of its length.