BpMatch: An Efficient Algorithm for a Segmental Analysis of Genomic Sequences

Here, we propose BpMatch: an algorithm that, working on a suitably modified suffix-tree data structure, is able to compute, in a fast and efficient way, the coverage of a source sequence S on a target sequence T, by taking into account direct and reverse segments, eventually overlapped. Using BpMatch, the operator should define a priori, the minimum length l of a segment and the minimum number of occurrences minRep, so that only segments longer than l and having a number of occurrences greater than minRep are considered to be significant. BpMatch outputs the significant segments found and the computed segment-based distance. On the worst case, assuming the alphabet dimension d is a constant, the time required by BpMatch to calculate the coverage is O(l²n). On the average, by setting l≥ 2 log_d(n), the time required to calculate the coverage is only O(n). BpMatch, thanks to the minRep parameter, can also be used to perform a self-covering: to cover a sequence using segments coming from itself, by avoiding the trivial solution of having a single segment coincident with the whole sequence. The result of the self-covering approach is a spectral representation of the repeats contained in the sequence. BpMatch is freely available on: www.sourceforge.net/projects/bpmatch/.