Summary: BIOINFORMATICS ORIGINAL PAPER
Vol. 21 no. 10 2005, pages 2171­2176
doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti327
Genome analysis
Divide-and-conquer approach for the exemplar breakpoint
distance
C. Thach Nguyen1, Y. C. Tay1,2 and Louxin Zhang2,
1School of Computing and 2Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117543
Received on December 3, 2004; revised on February 5, 2005; accepted on February 10, 2005
Advance Access publication February 15, 2005
ABSTRACT
Motivation: A one-to-one correspondence between the sets of genes
in the two genomes being compared is necessary for the notions
of breakpoint and reversal distances. To compare genomes where
there are paralogous genes, Sankoff formulated the exemplar dis-
tance problem as a general version of the genome rearrangement
problem. Unfortunately, the problem is NP-hard even for the breakpoint
distance.
Results: This paper proposes a divide-and-conquer approach for cal-
culating the exemplar breakpoint distance between two genomes with

Source: Anderson, Richard - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington at Seattle
Zhang, Louxin - Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences; Mathematics