A history of DNA sequence assembly

Abstract

DNA sequence assembly is a rich combinatorial problem that arose with the first DNA sequencing projects in the early 80's. Here we give a short history of the progression of algorithmic ideas used to solve the de novo problem of inferring a genome given a large sampling of substrings covering it. This classic inverse problem is compounded by a variety of experimental features and artifacts that must be considered in any realistic solution. While current methods produce very good results, the perfect assembler has yet to be built.