On the hardness of approximating linearization of scaffolds sharing repeated contigs

Abstract

Solutions to genome scaffolding problems can be represented as paths and cycles in a “solution graph”. However, when working with repetitions, such solution graph may contain branchings and they may not be uniquely convertible into sequences. Having introduced, in a previous work, various ways of extracting the unique parts of such solutions, we extend previously known NP-hardness results to the case that the solution graph is planar, bipartite, and subcubic, and show the APX-completeness in this case. We also provide some practical tests.