Alignment with non-overlapping inversions and translocations on two strings

Abstract

An inversion and a translocation are important in bio sequence analysis and motivate researchers to consider the sequence alignment problem using these operations. Based on inversion and translocation, we introduce a new alignment problem with non-overlapping inversions and translocations—given two strings x and y, find an alignment with non-overlapping inversions and translocations for x and y. This problem has interesting application for finding a common sequence from two mutated sequences. We, in particular, consider the alignment problem when non-overlapping inversions and translocations are allowed for both x and y. We design an efficient algorithm that determines the existence of such an alignment and retrieves an alignment, if exists.