Mining Biological Sequences with Masks

A new notion of motifs, called masks has been introduced, along with the tool MaskMiner to extract them. Masks can be seen as a succinct representation of the repeated patterns occurring in the given input sequence. In this paper we apply this paradigm to mine the sequences of two glutamate receptors of human and mouse genomes, and thus discover some properties concerning frequent masks.These experiments will also highlight some interesting peculiarities of MaskMiner.