Sensitivity analysis and efficient method for identifying optimal spaced seeds

Abstract

The novel introduction of spaced seed idea in the filtration stage of sequence comparison by Ma et al. (Bioinformatics 18 (2002) 440) has greatly increased the sensitivity of homology search without compromising the speed of search. Finding the optimal spaced seeds is of great importance both theoretically and in designing better search tool for sequence comparison. In this paper, we study the computational aspects of calculating the hitting probability of spaced seeds; and based on these results, we propose an efficient algorithm for identifying optimal spaced seeds.