Partitions, genomes, and life sequences
T ackling a problem by reducing it in smaller, more tractable parts, is the pathway that is followed to solve numerous, yet different, real-life problems. And divide-and-conquer can be rationally helpful to read through a genome's sequences of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs too. A method published in Genome Research facilitates reading genomes with partitioning. Sébastien Boisvert reports. Reading life Genomes contain the core code of life, or so we think. Recent technological advances are pushing for massively parallel acquisition of short digital sequences of DNA. However, these new sequencers -- machines that literally read DNA molecules -- can only decode about 30-150 digital letters at once of each DNA molecule among the many of them. Accordingly, algorithms implemented as computer programs make sense from these sequence reads by assembling them in longer sequences -- akin to solving puzzles. High-hanging fruit Whole-genome shotgun short read seq...