A basic analysis toolkit for biological sequences

This paper presents a software library, nicknamed BATS, for some basic sequence analysis tasks. Namely, local alignments, via approximate string matching, and global alignments, via longest common subsequence and alignments with affine and concave gap cost functions. Moreover, it also supports filtering operations to select strings from a set and establish their statistical significance, via z-score computation. None of the algorithms is new, but although they are generally regarded as fundamental for sequence analysis, they have not been implemented in a single and consistent software package, as we do here. Therefore, our main contribution is to fill this gap between algorithmic theory and practice by providing an extensible and easy to use software library that includes algorithms for the mentioned string matching and alignment problems. The library consists of C/C++ library functions as well as Perl library functions. It can be interfaced with Bioperl and can also be used as a stand-alone system with a GUI. The software is available at under the GNU GPL

Subsequences and Supersequences of Strings

Stringology - the study of strings - is a branch of algorithmics which been the sub-ject of mounting interest in recent years. Very recently, two books [M. Crochemore and W. Rytter, Text Algorithms, Oxford University Press, 1995] and [G. Stephen, String Searching Algorithms, World Scientific, 1994] have been published on the subject and at least two others are known to be in preparation. Problems on strings arise in information retrieval, version control, automatic spelling correction, and many other domains. However the greatest motivation for recent work in stringology has come from the field of molecular biology. String problems occur, for example, in genetic sequence construction, genetic sequence comparison, and phylogenetic tree construction. In this thesis we study a variety of string problems from a theoretical perspective. In particular, we focus on problems involving subsequences and supersequences of strings

Speeding-up Hirschberg and Hunt-Szymanski LCS algorithms

International audienc

Speeding-up Hirschberg and Hunt-Szymanski LCS Algorithms

Two algorithms are presented that solve the problem of recovering the longest common subsequence of two strings. The first algorithm is an improvement of Hirschberg’s divide-and-conquer algorithm. The second algorithm is an improvement of Hunt-Szymanski algorithm based on an efficient computation of all dominant match points. These two algorithms use bit-vector operations and are shown to work very efficiently in practice

Algorithms for string matching with applications in molecular biology

As the volume of genetic sequence data increases due to improved sequencing techniques and increased interest, the computational tools available to analyze the data are becoming inadequate. This thesis seeks to improve a few of the computational methods available to access and analyze data in the genetic sequence databases. The first two results are parallel algorithms based on previously known sequential algorithms. The third result is a new approach, based on assumptions that we believe make sense in the biological context of the problem, to approximating an NP complete problem. The final result is a fundamentally new approach to approximate string matching using the divide and conquer paradigm instead of the dynamic programming approach that has been used almost exclusively in the past. Dynamic programming algorithms to measure the distance between sequences have been known since at least 1972. Recently there has been interest in developing parallel algorithms to measure the distance between two sequences. We have developed an optimal parallel algorithm to find the edit distance, a metric frequently used to measure distance, between two sequences. It is often interesting to find the substrings of length k that appear most frequently in a given string. We give a simple sequential algorithm to solve this problem and an efficient parallel version of the algorithm. The parallel algorithm uses an efficient novel parallel bucket sort. When sequencing a large segment of DNA, the original DNA sequence is reconstructed using the results of sequencing fragments, that may or may not contain errors, of many copies of the original DNA. New algorithms are given to solve the problem of reconstructing the original DNA sequence with and without errors introduced into the fragments. A program based on this algorithm is used to reconstruct the human beta globin region (HUMHBB) when given a set of 300 to 500 mers drawn randomly from the HUMHBB region. Approximate string matching is used in a biological context to model the steps of evolution. While such evolution may proceed base by base using the change, insert, or delete operators, there is also evidence that whole genes may be moved or inverted. We introduce a new problem, the string to string rearrangement problem, that allows movement and inversion of substrings. We give a divide and conquer algorithm for finding a rearrangement of one string within another