Identifying regions of a gene that are susceptible to mutation

Abstract

In this article, the susceptibility of any gene to mutation is explained through the tumor suppressor gene TP53 using the concept of the energy of a graph. We considered the structure of TP53 gene as a weighted graph where the weights are the bond dissociation energies. We computed energies of each exon and investigated how they distributed over the bases. We observed that exons 4 and 12 have unusual energy distributions compared to other exons. The energy was found to be signifi- cantly reduced relative to other regions between the 44th and 47th codons of exon 4, and this is in line with the literature results to which these regions are subject to severe missense and frameshift mutations. The energy of exon 12 changes very rapidly at very short intervals and is not consistently distributed across the exon. The excited energy probability distribution of exon 9 is used to determine the most vulnerable region of exon 9 when subjected to any physical or chemical external influences.