Efficient computation of sequence mappability

Abstract

Sequence mappability is an important task in genome re-sequencing. In the (k, m)-mappability problem, for a given sequence T of length n, our goal is to compute a table whose ith entry is the number of indices j≠i such that length-m substrings of T starting at positions i and j have at most k mismatches. Previous works on this problem focused on heuristic approaches to compute a rough approximation of the result or on the case of k=1. We present several efficient algorithms for the general case of the problem. Our main result is an algorithm that works in O(n min {mk,log k+1 n}) time and O(n) space for k=O(1). It requires a careful adaptation of the technique of Cole et al. [STOC 2004] to avoid multiple counting of pairs of substrings. We also show O(n2) -time algorithms to compute all results for a fixed m and all k=0,…,m or a fixed k and all m=k,…,n-1. Finally we show that the (k, m)-mappability problem cannot be solved in strongly subquadratic time for k,m = Θ (log n) unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis fails.