A New Approach for Motif Discovery Based on the de Bruijn Graph

This paper attempts to provide a new approach to discover conserved regions such as motifs in either DNA or Protein sequences. We have followed a graph-based approach to solve this problem, in particular, using the idea of de Bruijn graphs. The de Bruijn graph has been successfully adopted to solve problems such as local alignment and DNA fragment assembly. Our method harnesses the power of the de Bruijn graph to discover the conserved regions in a DNA or protein sequence. We have found that the algorithm was successful in mining signals for larger number of sequences and at a faster rate when compared to some popular motif searching tools.