arXiv subjects

Taher Mun

Publications and source records attributed to Taher Mun.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2019

Matching reads to many genomes with the $r$-index

The $r$-index is a tool for compressed indexing of genomic databases for exact pattern matching, which can be used to completely align reads that perfectly match some part of a genome in the database or to find seeds for reads that do not. This paper shows how to download and install the programs ri-buildfasta and ri-align; how to call ri-buildfasta on a FASTA file to build an $r$-index for that file; and how to query that index with ri-align. Availability: The source code for these programs is released under GPLv3 and available at https://github.com/alshai/r-index .

cs.DS↗

arXiv2018

Prefix-Free Parsing for Building Big BWTs

High-throughput sequencing technologies have led to explosive growth of genomic databases; one of which will soon reach hundreds of terabytes. For many applications we want to build and store indexes of these databases but constructing such indexes is a challenge. Fortunately, many of these genomic databases are highly-repetitive---a characteristic that can be exploited to ease the computation of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT), which underlies many popular indexes. In this paper, we introduce a preprocessing algorithm, referred to as {\em prefix-free parsing}, that takes a text $T$ as input, and in one-pass generates a dictionary $D$ and a parse $P$ of $T$ with the property that the BWT of $T$ can be constructed from $D$ and $P$ using workspace proportional to their total size and $O (|T|)$-time. Our experiments show that $D$ and $P$ are significantly smaller than $T$ in practice, and thus, can fit in a reasonable internal memory even when $T$ is very large. In particular, we show that with prefix-free parsing we can build an 131-megabyte run-length compressed FM-index (restricted to support only counting and not locating) for 1000 copies of human chromosome 19 in 2 hours using 21 gigabytes of memory, suggesting that we can build a 6.73 gigabyte index for 1000 complete human-genome haplotypes in approximately 102 hours using about 1 terabyte of memory.

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arXiv2018

Efficient Construction of a Complete Index for Pan-Genomics Read Alignment

While short read aligners, which predominantly use the FM-index, are able to easily index one or a few human genomes, they do not scale well to indexing databases containing thousands of genomes. To understand why, it helps to examine the main components of the FM-index in more detail, which is a rank data structure over the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) of the string that will allow us to find the interval in the string's suffix array (SA) containing pointers to starting positions of occurrences of a given pattern; second, a sample of the SA that --- when used with the rank data structure --- allows us access the SA. The rank data structure can be kept small even for large genomic databases, by run-length compressing the BWT, but until recently there was no means known to keep the SA sample small without greatly slowing down access to the SA. Now that Gagie et al. (SODA 2018) have defined an SA sample that takes about the same space as the run-length compressed BWT --- we have the design for efficient FM-indexes of genomic databases but are faced with the problem of building them. In 2018 we showed how to build the BWT of large genomic databases efficiently (WABI 2018) but the problem of building Gagie et al.'s SA sample efficiently was left open. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art methods for constructing the SA sample, and demonstrate that it is the fastest and most space-efficient method on highly repetitive genomic databases. Lastly, we apply our method for indexing partial and whole human genomes, and show that it improves over Bowtie with respect to both memory and time.

cs.DS↗