@article {49683, title = {Reducing storage requirements for biological sequence comparison.}, journal = {Bioinformatics}, volume = {20}, year = {2004}, month = {2004 Dec 12}, pages = {3363-9}, abstract = {

MOTIVATION: Comparison of nucleic acid and protein sequences is a fundamental tool of modern bioinformatics. A dominant method of such string matching is the {\textquoteright}seed-and-extend{\textquoteright} approach, in which occurrences of short subsequences called {\textquoteright}seeds{\textquoteright} are used to search for potentially longer matches in a large database of sequences. Each such potential match is then checked to see if it extends beyond the seed. To be effective, the seed-and-extend approach needs to catalogue seeds from virtually every substring in the database of search strings. Projects such as mammalian genome assemblies and large-scale protein matching, however, have such large sequence databases that the resulting list of seeds cannot be stored in RAM on a single computer. This significantly slows the matching process.

RESULTS: We present a simple and elegant method in which only a small fraction of seeds, called {\textquoteright}minimizers{\textquoteright}, needs to be stored. Using minimizers can speed up string-matching computations by a large factor while missing only a small fraction of the matches found using all seeds.

}, keywords = {algorithms, Databases, Genetic, Information Storage and Retrieval, Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted, sequence alignment, Sequence Analysis}, issn = {1367-4803}, doi = {10.1093/bioinformatics/bth408}, author = {Roberts, Michael and Hayes, Wayne and Hunt, Brian R and Mount, Stephen M and Yorke, James A} }