SEQUENCING BY HYBRIDIZATION

A Project in Computational Biology

Project Highlight

Sequencing by hybridization is a novel DNA sequencing technique in which an array (SBH chip) of short sequences of nucleotides (probes) is brought in contact with a solution of (replicas of) the target DNA sequence. A biochemical method determines the subset of probes that bind to the target sequence (the spectrum of the sequence), and a combinatorial method is used to reconstruct the DNA sequence from the spectrum.

Since technology limits the number of probes on the SBH chip, a challenging combinatorial question is the design of a smallest set of probes that can sequence an arbitrary DNA string of a given length. We show in this work that the use of universal bases (bases that bind to any nucleotide) can drastically improve the performance of the SBH process. We present a novel probe design with performance that asymptotically approaches the information-theoretical bound up to a constant factor, and, for any number of probes, is significantly better than previously analyzed probe patterns. Furthermore, the sequencing algorithm we use is substantially simpler than the Eulerian path method used in previous work.

People

Publications

A.M. Frieze, F.P. Preparata, E. Upfal.
``Optimal reconstruction of a sequence from its probes''.
Journal of Computational Biology 1999.

F.P. Preparata, A.M. Frieze, E. Upfal.
On the Power of Universal Bases in Sequencing by Hybridization.
Third Annual International Conference on Computational Molecular Biology.
April 11 - 14, 1999, Lyon, France, pp. 295--301

F.P. Preparata, E. Upfal.
Sequencing-by-hybridization at the information-theory bound: an optimal algorithm .
Fourth Annual International Conference on Computational Molecular Biology.
Tokyo, April 2000.

Patent

F.P. Preparata and E. Upfal.
``Systems and Methods for Sequencing by Hybridization''.
U.S. patent application 60/125,704, filed March 23,1999.