Abstract

Space, not time, is often the limiting factor when computing optimal sequence alignments, and a number of recent papers in the biology literature have proposed space-saving strategies. However, a 1975 computer science paper by Hirschberg presented a method that is superior to the new proposals, both in theory and in practice. The goal of this paper is to give Hirschberg's idea the visibility it deserves by developing a linear-space version of Gotoh's algorithm, which accommodates affine gap penalties. A portable C-software package implementing this algorithm is available on the BIONET free of charge.

Keywords

Computer scienceAffine transformationSoftwareSpace (punctuation)LimitingSequence (biology)VisibilityLinear spaceTheoretical computer scienceSoftware packageAlgorithmMathematicsProgramming languageBiologyDiscrete mathematicsEngineering

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Publication Info

Year
1988
Type
article
Volume
4
Issue
1
Pages
11-17
Citations
1234
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Eugene W. Myers, Webb Miller (1988). Optimal alignments in linear space. Computer applications in the biosciences , 4 (1) , 11-17. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/4.1.11

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DOI
10.1093/bioinformatics/4.1.11