Two different strategies for determining the human genome are currently being pursued: one is the "clone-by-clone" approach, employed by the publicly funded project, and the other is the "whole genome shotgun assembler" approach, favored by researchers at Celera Genomics. An interim strategy employed at Celera, called compartmentalized shotgun assembly, makes use of preliminary data produced by...

Atlas is a suite of programs developed for assembly of genomes by a "combined approach" that uses DNA sequence reads from both BACs and whole-genome shotgun (WGS) libraries. The BAC clones afford advantages of localized assembly with reduced computational load, and provide a robust method for dealing with repeated sequences. Inclusion of WGS sequences facilitates use of different clone insert s...

This paper studies sequencing and mapping methods that rely solely on pooling and shotgun sequencing of clones. First, we scrutinize and improve the recently proposed Clone-Array Pooled Shotgun Sequencing (CAPSS) method, which delivers a BAC-linked assembly of a whole genome sequence. Secondly, we introduce a novel physical mapping method, called Clone-Array Pooled Shotgun Mapping (CAPS-MAP), w...

We consider the problem of reconstructing graphs or labeled graphs from neighborhoods of a given radius r. Special instances of this problem include DNA shotgun assembly, neural network reconstruction, and assembling random jigsaw puzzles. We provide some necessary and some sufficient conditions for correct recovery both in combinatorial terms and for some generative models including random lab...

T race to sequence the human genome has garnered a level of popular attention unprecedented for a scientific endeavor. This fascination has partly been caused of course by the importance of the goal; but it also reflects the Olympian nature of the contest, which opposed two capable teams with sharply contrasting cultures (public and private), personalities, and strategies. Titanic struggles bei...

Ciliates are the only unicellular eukaryotes known to separate germinal and somatic functions. Diploid but silent micronuclei transmit the genetic information to the next sexual generation. Polyploid macronuclei express the genetic information from a streamlined version of the genome but are replaced at each sexual generation. The macronuclear genome of Paramecium tetraurelia was recently seque...

Motivation: Assembling shotgun sequencing data from repetitive DNA sequences is a non-trivial task. In existing sequence assembly methods repeats are resolved by either using statistical analyses to identify and separate fragments corresponding to repeats, or by using extra information, not contained in the fragments. In this paper we take a different approach. Using the simulated-tempering Mon...

Investigation of viruses in the environment often requires the amplification of viral DNA before sequencing of viral metagenomes. In this study, two of the most widely used amplification methods, the linker amplified shotgun library (LASL) and multiple displacement amplification (MDA) methods, were applied to a sample from the seawater surface. Viral DNA was extracted from viruses concentrated ...

Sequencing errors in combination with repeated regions cause major problems in shotgun sequencing, mainly due to the failure of assembly programs to distinguish single base differences between repeat copies from erroneous base calls. In this paper, a new strategy designed to correct errors in shotgun sequence data using defined nucleotide positions, DNPs, is presented. The method distinguishes ...