Alignment problems in computational biology have been focused recently because of the rapid growth of sequence databases. By computing alignment, we can understand similarity among the sequences. Dynamic programming is a technique to find optimal alignment, but it requires very long computation time. We have shown that dynamic programming for more than two sequences can be efficiently processed...

Evidence is accumulating that small open reading frames (sORF, <100 codons) play key roles in many important biological processes. Yet, they are generally ignored in gene annotation despite they are far more abundant than the genes with more than 100 codons. Here, we demonstrate that popular homolog search and codon-index techniques perform poorly for small genes relative to that for larger gen...

DNA sequences are translated into protein coding sequences and then further assigned to protein families in metagenomic analyses, because of the need for sensitivity. However, huge amounts of sequence data create the problem that even general homology search analyses using BLASTX become difficult in terms of computational cost. We designed a new homology search algorithm that finds seed sequenc...

Identifying genomic homology within and between genomes is essential when studying genome evolution. In the past years, different computational techniques have been developed to detect homology even when the actual similarity between homologous segments is low. Depending on the strategy used, these methods search for pairs of chromosomal segments between which either both gene content and order...

A tandem repeat is a sequence of two or more contiguous, approximate copies of a pattern. Tandem repeats occur in the genomes of both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. They are important in numerous fields including disease diagnosis, mapping studies, human identity testing (DNA fingerprinting), sequence homology, and population studies. Although tandem repeats have been used by biologists ...

Optimal spaced seeds were introduced by the theoretical computer science community to bioinformatics to effectively increase homology search sensitivity. These seeds are serving many homology queries daily. However the computational complexity of finding the optimal spaced seeds remains to be open. In this paper, we prove that computing hit probability of a spaced seed in a uniform homology reg...

DNA recombinases face the daunting task of locating and pairing up specific sequences among millions of base pairs in a genome, all within about an hour. Qi et al. show that recombinases solve this problem by searching in 8-nt microhomology units, reducing the search space and accelerating the homology search.