Chapter 3 - Determining Genome Sequences from Experimental Data Using Evolutionary Computation

Abstract

The generation of accurate DNA sequences is one of the most challenging, important, and time-consuming problems in genomics today. The emerging science of bioinformatics deals with analyzing and exploiting the information in DNA sequences. This chapter deals with the technology that leads to the determination of DNA sequences and shows that advanced optimization techniques play an important role in the enterprise. In particular, it shows that an evolutionary algorithm approach seems superior to other methods that have been employed when using the sequencing by hybridization technique. The chapter details the biochemical preliminaries required for an understanding of how sequences are identified in the laboratory. Moreover, the chapter discusses the central optimization problem and the techniques to address this problem.