0000000000039683
AUTHOR
Cinzia Pizzi
Characterization and Extraction of Irredundant Tandem Motifs
We address the problem of extracting pairs of subwords (m1,m2) from a text string s of length n, such that, given also an integer constant d in input, m1 and m2 occur in tandem within a maximum distance of d symbols in s. The main effort of this work is to eliminate the possible redundancy from the candidate set of the so found tandem motifs. To this aim, we first introduce the concept of maximality, characterized by four specific conditions, that we show to be not deducible by the corresponding notion of maximality already defined for "simple" (i.e., non tandem) motifs. Then, we further eliminate the remaining redundancy by defining the concept of irredundancy for tandem motifs. We prove t…
Entropic Profiles, Maximal Motifs and the Discovery of Significant Repetitions in Genomic Sequences
The degree of predictability of a sequence can be measured by its entropy and it is closely related to its repetitiveness and compressibility. Entropic profiles are useful tools to study the under- and over-representation of subsequences, providing also information about the scale of each conserved DNA region. On the other hand, compact classes of repetitive motifs, such as maximal motifs, have been proved to be useful for the identification of significant repetitions and for the compression of biological sequences. In this paper we show that there is a relationship between entropic profiles and maximal motifs, and in particular we prove that the former are a subset of the latter. As a furt…
Efficient Algorithms for Sequence Analysis with Entropic Profiles
Entropy, being closely related to repetitiveness and compressibility, is a widely used information-related measure to assess the degree of predictability of a sequence. Entropic profiles are based on information theory principles, and can be used to study the under-/over-representation of subwords, by also providing information about the scale of conserved DNA regions. Here, we focus on the algorithmic aspects related to entropic profiles. In particular, we propose linear time algorithms for their computation that rely on suffix-based data structures, more specifically on the truncated suffix tree (TST) and on the enhanced suffix array (ESA). We performed an extensive experimental campaign …
Irredundant tandem motifs
Eliminating the possible redundancy from a set of candidate motifs occurring in an input string is fundamental in many applications. The existing techniques proposed to extract irredundant motifs are not suitable when the motifs to search for are structured, i.e., they are made of two (or several) subwords that co-occur in a text string s of length n. The main effort of this work is studying and characterizing a compact class of tandem motifs, that is, pairs of substrings {m1, m2} occurring in tandem within a maximum distance of d symbols in s, where d is an integer constant given in input. To this aim, we first introduce the concept of maximality, related to four specific conditions that h…