Canal-U

5.6. The diversity of bioinformatics algorithms

In this course, we have seen a very little set of bioinformatic algorithms. There exist numerous various algorithms in bioinformatics which deal with a large span of classes of problems. For example, read assembly. We have seen how NGS sequencers produce large sets of reads, small sequences which overlap. And the problem of assembly isto use the overlap in order to ordering this read and reconstructing the whole genomic sequence. This is the overlapping and you see that you can use this overlap to get a longer sequence. Of course, here the example issimple: you have to imagine a set of millions of reads to beassembled into genomic sequences of millions or billions of bases. A second class of problems issequence mapping and comparison. We have seen sequence comparison. What about sequence mapping? You remember this situation in which biologists get what they call "cDNA". Experimentally, this is a sequence of DNA and they want to map this sequence of DNA on the sequence of the genome in order to say: well, this is an exon, this i an exon and so on.