Abstract
We address the problem of finding a minimum-size set of k-mers that hits L-long sequences. The problem arises in the design of compact hash functions and other data structures for efficient handling of large sequencing datasets. We prove that the problem of hitting a given set of L-long sequences is NP-hard and give a heuristic solution that finds a compact universal k-mer set that hits any set of L-long sequences. The algorithm, called DOCKS (design of compact k-mer sets), works in two phases: (i) finding a minimum-size k-mer set that hits every infinite sequence; (ii) greedily adding k-mers such that together they hit all remaining L-long sequences. We show that DOCKS works well in practice and produces a set of k-mers that is much smaller than a random choice of k-mers. We present results for various values of k and sequence lengths L and by applying them to two bacterial genomes show that universal hitting k-mers improve on minimizers. The software and exemplary sets are freely available at acgt.cs.tau.ac.il/docks/.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Algorithms in Bioinformatics - 16th International Workshop, WABI 2016, Proceedings |
| Editors | Martin Frith, Christian Nørgaard Storm Pedersen |
| Publisher | Springer Verlag |
| Pages | 257-268 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9783319436807 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2016 |
| Externally published | Yes |
| Event | 16th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics, WABI 2016 - Aarhus, Denmark Duration: 22 Aug 2016 → 24 Aug 2016 |
Publication series
| Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) |
|---|---|
| Volume | 9838 LNCS |
| ISSN (Print) | 0302-9743 |
| ISSN (Electronic) | 1611-3349 |
Conference
| Conference | 16th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics, WABI 2016 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Denmark |
| City | Aarhus |
| Period | 22/08/16 → 24/08/16 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:R.S. was supported in part by the Israel Science Foundation as part of the ISF-NSFC joint program 2015–2018. D.P. was supported in part by a Ph.D. fellowship from the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel-Aviv University. This research is funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Data-Driven Discovery Initiative through Grant GBMF4554 to C.K., by the US National Science Foundation (CCF-1256087, CCF-1319998) and by the US National Institutes of Health (R01HG007104). C.K. received support as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. Part of this work was done while Y.O., R.S. and C.K. were visiting the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.