Exhaustive Exact String Matching: The Analysis of the Full Human Genome
This work addresses a bottleneck in bioinformatics by enabling exhaustive string detection, which could enhance pattern analysis in genomics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing data structures and algorithms.
The authors tackled the problem of detecting all repeated strings in biological sequences without requiring predefined search patterns, and demonstrated their method by identifying all repeated strings up to 50 characters in length across the entire human genome, a task previously impractical due to exponential complexity.
Exact string matching has been a fundamental problem in computer science for decades because of many practical applications. Some are related to common procedures, such as searching in files and text editors, or, more recently, to more advanced problems such as pattern detection in Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics. Tens of algorithms and methodologies have been developed for pattern matching and several programming languages, packages, applications and online systems exist that can perform exact string matching in biological sequences. These techniques, however, are limited to searching for specific and predefined strings in a sequence. In this paper a novel methodology (called Ex2SM) is presented, which is a pipeline of execution of advanced data structures and algorithms, explicitly designed for text mining, that can detect every possible repeated string in multivariate biological sequences. In contrast to known algorithms in literature, the methodology presented here is string agnostic, i.e., it does not require an input string to search for it, rather it can detect every string that exists at least twice, regardless of its attributes such as length, frequency, alphabet, overlapping etc. The complexity of the problem solved and the potential of the proposed methodology is demonstrated with the experimental analysis performed on the entire human genome. More specifically, all repeated strings with a length of up to 50 characters have been detected, an achievement which is practically impossible using other algorithms due to the exponential number of possible permutations of such long strings.