On the complexity of positional sequencing by hybridization

J Comput Biol. 2001;8(4):361-71. doi: 10.1089/106652701752236188.

Abstract

In sequencing by hybridization (SBH), one has to reconstruct a sequence from its l-long substrings. SBH was proposed as an alternative to gel-based DNA sequencing approaches, but in its original form the method is not competitive. Positional SBH (PSBH) is a recently proposed enhancement of SBH in which one has additional information about the possible positions of each substring along the target sequence. We give a linear time algorithm for solving PSBH when each substring has at most two possible positions. On the other hand, we prove that the problem is NP-complete if each substring has at most three possible positions. We also show that PSBH is NP-complete if the set of allowed positions for each substring is an interval of length k and provide a fast algorithm for the latter problem when k is bounded.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Computational Biology
  • Nucleic Acid Hybridization*
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA / methods*
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA / statistics & numerical data