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An External-Memory Algorithm for String Graph Construction

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Abstract

Some recent results (Bauer et al. in Algorithms in bioinformatics, Springer, Berlin, pp 326–337, 2012; Cox et al. in Algorithms in bioinformatics, Springer, Berlin, pp. 214–224, 2012; Rosone and Sciortino in The nature of computation. Logic, algorithms, applications, Springer, Berlin, pp 353–364, 2013) have introduced external-memory algorithms to compute self-indexes of a set of strings, mainly via computing the Burrows–Wheeler transform of the input strings. The motivations for those results stem from Bioinformatics, where a large number of short strings (called reads) are routinely produced and analyzed. In that field, a fundamental problem is to assemble a genome from a large set of much shorter samples extracted from the unknown genome. The approaches that are currently used to tackle this problem are memory-intensive. This fact does not bode well with the ongoing increase in the availability of genomic data. A data structure that is used in genome assembly is the string graph, where vertices correspond to samples and arcs represent two overlapping samples. In this paper we address an open problem of Simpson and Durbin (Bioinformatics 26(12):i367–i373, 2010): to design an external-memory algorithm to compute the string graph.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of the MIUR PRIN 2010-2011 grant “Automi e Linguaggi Formali: Aspetti Matematici e Applicativi” code 2010LYA9RH, of the Cariplo Foundation grant 2013-0955 (Modulation of anti cancer immune response by regulatory non-coding RNAs), of the FA 2013 grant “Metodi algoritmici e modelli: aspetti teorici e applicazioni in bioinformatica” code 2013-ATE-0281, and of the FA 2014 grant “Algoritmi e modelli computazionali: aspetti teorici e applicazioni nelle scienze della vita” code 2014-ATE-0382. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DISCo, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Paola Bonizzoni, Gianluca Della Vedova, Yuri Pirola, Marco Previtali & Raffaella Rizzi

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  1. Paola Bonizzoni
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  2. Gianluca Della Vedova
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  3. Yuri Pirola
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  4. Marco Previtali
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  5. Raffaella Rizzi
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Correspondence to Marco Previtali.

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Bonizzoni, P., Della Vedova, G., Pirola, Y. et al. An External-Memory Algorithm for String Graph Construction. Algorithmica 78, 394–424 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-016-0165-4

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