Invited Lecture — Accelerating Smith-Waterman Searches

Abstract

Searching a database for a local alignment to a query under a typical scoring scheme such as PAM120 or BLOSUM62, is a computation that has resisted algorithmic improvement due to its basis in dynamic programming and the weak nature of the signals being searched for. In a query preprocessing step, a set of tables can be built that permit one to (a) eliminate a large fraction of the dynamic programming matrix from consideration, and (b) to compute several steps of the remainder with a single table lookup. While this result is not an asymptotic improvement over the original Smith-Waterman algorithm, its complexity is characterized in terms of some sparse features of the matrix and it does yields 3.33 factor improvement over the basic algorithm in practice.