Reconstructing Strings from Substrings

Steven S. Skiena

Department of Computer Science
State University of New York
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4400


Suppose that there was an unknown string S, over a known alphabet, containing the secret to life. We are permitted to ask questions of the form "is s a substring of S?'', where s is a specific query string. We are not told where s occurs in S, nor how many times it occurs, just whether or not s a substring of S. Our goal is to determine the exact contents of S using as few queries as possible.

Although this tale is perhaps too dramatic, it is not completely inaccurate. The problem arises in sequencing by hybridization, a new and promising approach to DNA sequencing which offers the potential of reduced cost and higher throughput over traditional gel-based approaches. In this talk, we will discuss the application to sequencing by hybridization and present the following results:

This is joint work with Gopalakrishnan Sundaram.


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Document last modified on March 28, 2000.