title: Indexing strategies for rapid searches of short words in genome sequences.
abstract: Searching for matches between large collections of short (14-30 nucleotides) words and sequence databases comprising full genomes or transcriptomes is a common task in biological sequence analysis. We investigated the performance of simple indexing strategies for handling such tasks and developed two programs, fetchGWI and tagger, that index either the database or the query set. Either strategy outperforms megablast for searches with more than 10,000 probes. FetchGWI is shown to be a versatile tool for rapidly searching multiple genomes, whose performance is limited in most cases by the speed of access to the filesystem. We have made publicly available a Web interface for searching the human, mouse, and several other genomes and transcriptomes with oligonucleotide queries.
authors.affiliation: Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Bâtiment Génopode, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Bátiment Génopode, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Christian. Iseli@lic.org
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Iseli
authors.forename: Giovanna
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ambrosini
authors.forename: Philipp
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bucher
authors.forename: C Victor
authors.initials: CV
authors.lastname: Jongeneel
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology; D030561:Databases, Nucleic Acid; D016678:Genome; D006801:Humans; D051379:Mice; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012984:Software