GENSCAN is an program

Computer program

A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...

 to identify complete gene

Gene

A gene is a molecular unit of heredity of a living organism. It is a name given to some stretches of DNA and RNA that code for a type of protein or for an RNA chain that has a function in the organism. Living beings depend on genes, as they specify all proteins and functional RNA chains...

 structures in genomic DNA

DNA

Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...

. It is a GHMM

Hidden Markov model

A hidden Markov model is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved states. An HMM can be considered as the simplest dynamic Bayesian network. The mathematics behind the HMM was developed by L. E...

-based program that can be used to predict the location of genes

Gene prediction

In computational biology gene prediction or gene finding refers to the process of identifying the regions of genomic DNA that encode genes. This includes protein-coding genes as well as RNA genes, but may also include prediction of other functional elements such as regulatory regions...

 and their exon

Exon

An exon is a nucleic acid sequence that is represented in the mature form of an RNA molecule either after portions of a precursor RNA have been removed by cis-splicing or when two or more precursor RNA molecules have been ligated by trans-splicing. The mature RNA molecule can be a messenger RNA...

-intron

Intron

An intron is any nucleotide sequence within a gene that is removed by RNA splicing to generate the final mature RNA product of a gene. The term intron refers to both the DNA sequence within a gene, and the corresponding sequence in RNA transcripts. Sequences that are joined together in the final...

 boundaries in genomic sequences from a variety of organisms. The GENSCAN Web server can be found at MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

.

GENSCAN was developed by Christopher Burge

Christopher Burge

Christopher B. Burge is the Whitehead Career Development Associate Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.He completed his Bachelor of Science at Stanford University in 1990, and continued graduate studies in computational biology at Stanford University, gaining his PhD in...

  in the research group of Samuel Karlin

Samuel Karlin

Samuel Karlin was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century.Karlin was born in Yanova, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child...

  Department of Mathematics, Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.