MATLAB: How to make a cell with the following contents

bioinformaticscellarraygenevector

I am making a program that basically takes a string s as a single strand of DNA and returns the amino acid sequence of the longest gene it finds. Whereby, a gene is defined as a reading frame that: starts with AUG codon, ends with one of UAA,UAG, or UGA codon.
I tried making a cell of different "frames" but since they are not the same length I can't put them into an array. How do i work around this? Here's my code:
function [ptn]=Seq_transcribe2(x)
y=seq_transcribe1(x);
frames={};
frames={x(1:end) x(2:end) x(3:end) y(1:end) y(2:end)
 y(3:end)};
starts=[];
stops=[];
allorfs={};
for i=1:3:numel(frames)-2
  codon= frames([i i+1 i+2])
    if codon=='AUG'
    starts(end+1)=codon;
if strcmp(codon,'UAA') || strcmp(codon,'UAG') || strcmp(codon,'UGA')
    stops(end+1)=codon;
end
stops= find(stops>starts,1)
lengthofthisstart=stops-starts
allorfs{end+1}=frame(starts:stops-1)

Best Answer

If I understood correctly, a simple way to find all genes would be:
[genesequences, starts, stops] = regexp(x, 'AUG.*?(UAA|UAG|UGA)', 'match', 'start', 'end');
And the longest sequence is of course:
[~, longestidx] = max(stops - starts);
longestsequence = genesequences{longestidx}
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