Related papers: Genome assembly, from practice to theory: safe, co…
As computer scientists working in bioinformatics/computational biology, we often face the challenge of coming up with an algorithm to answer a biological question. This occurs in many areas, such as variant calling, alignment, and assembly.…
Recent advances in DNA sequencing open prospects to make whole-genome analysis rapid and reliable, which is promising for various applications including personalized medicine. However, existing techniques for {\it de novo} genome assembly,…
Despite the recent progress in genome sequencing and assembly, many of the currently available assembled genomes come in a draft form. Such draft genomes consist of a large number of genomic fragments (scaffolds), whose order and/or…
In a strongly connected graph $G = (V,E)$, a cut arc (also called strong bridge) is an arc $e \in E$ whose removal makes the graph no longer strongly connected. Equivalently, there exist $u,v \in V$, such that all $u$-$v$ walks contain $e$.…
Microbes have a profound impact on our health and environment, but our understanding of the diversity and function of microbial communities is severely limited. Through DNA sequencing of microbial communities (metagenomics), DNA fragments…
The problem of assembling DNA fragments starting from imperfect strings given by a sequencer, classified as NP hard when trying to get perfect answers, has a huge importance in several fields, because of its relation with the possibility of…
We formulate genome assembly problem as an optimization problem in which the objective function is the likelihood of the assembly given the reads.
(An updated version of this manuscript has been accepted to Scientific Reports in 2016, please refer to http://www.nature.com/articles/srep31900) The highly anticipated transition from next generation sequencing (NGS) to third generation…
One of the most computationally intensive tasks in computational biology is de novo genome assembly, the decoding of the sequence of an unknown genome from redundant and erroneous short sequences. A common assembly paradigm identifies…
The transversal hypergraph problem is the task of enumerating the minimal hitting sets of a hypergraph. It is a long-standing open question whether this can be done in output-polynomial time. For hypergraphs whose solutions have bounded…
In the past several years, the problem of genome assembly has received considerable attention from both biologists and computer scientists. An important component of current assembly methods is the scaffolding process. This process involves…
Aligning a sequence to a walk in a labeled graph is a problem of fundamental importance to Computational Biology. For finding a walk in an arbitrary graph with $|E|$ edges that exactly matches a pattern of length $m$, a lower bound based on…
An exact-match overlap graph of $n$ given strings of length $\ell$ is an edge-weighted graph in which each vertex is associated with a string and there is an edge $(x,y)$ of weight $\omega = \ell - |ov_{max}(x,y)|$ if and only if $\omega…
Gene assembly in ciliates is one of the most involved DNA processings going on in any organism. This process transforms one nucleus (the micronucleus) into another functionally different nucleus (the macronucleus). We continue the…
Genome assembly using high throughput data with short reads, arguably, remains an unresolvable task in repetitive genomes, since when the length of a repeat exceeds the read length, it becomes difficult to unambiguously connect the flanking…
Decomposing a network flow into weighted paths has numerous applications. Some applications require any decomposition that is optimal w.r.t. some property such as number of paths, robustness, or length. Many bioinformatic applications…
We propose an assembly algorithm {\sc Barnacle} for sequences generated by the clone-based approach. We illustrate our approach by assembling the human genome. Our novel method abandons the original physical-mapping-first framework. As we…
Motivated by the question of how macromolecules assemble, the notion of an {\it assembly tree} of a graph is introduced. Given a graph $G$, the paper is concerned with enumerating the number of assembly trees of $G$, a problem that applies…
Several biological problems require the identification of regions in a sequence where some feature occurs within a target density range: examples including the location of GC-rich regions, identification of CpG islands, and sequence…
The reduction of the fragment assembly problem to (variations of) the classical Eulerian trail problem [Pevzner et al., PNAS 2001] has led to remarkable progress in genome assembly. This reduction employs the notion of de Bruijn graph…