Perfect Hamming code with a hash table for faster genome mapping

BACKGROUND: With the advent of next-generation sequencers, the growing demands to map short DNA sequences to a genome have promoted the development of fast algorithms and tools. The tools commonly used today are based on either a hash table or the suffix array/Burrow–Wheeler transform. These algorithms are the best suited to finding the genome position of exactly matching short reads. However, they have limited capacity to handle the mismatches. To find n-mismatches, they requires O(2(n)) times the computation time of exact matches. Therefore, acceleration techniques are required. RESULTS: We propose a hash-based method for genome mapping that reduces the number of hash references for finding mismatches without increasing the size of the hash table. The method regards DNA subsequences as words on Galois extension field GF(2(2)) and each word is encoded to a code word of a perfect Hamming code. The perfect Hamming code defines equivalence classes of DNA subsequences. Each equivalence class includes subsequence whose corresponding words on GF(2(2)) are encoded to a corresponding code word. The code word is used as a hash key to store these subsequences in a hash table. Specifically, it reduces by about 70% the number of hash keys necessary for searching the genome positions of all 2-mismatches of 21-base-long DNA subsequence. CONCLUSIONS: The paper shows perfect hamming code can reduce the number of hash references for hash-based genome mapping. As the computation time to calculate code words is far shorter than a hash reference, our method is effective to reduce the computation time to map short DNA sequences to genome. The amount of data that DNA sequencers generate continues to increase and more accurate genome mappings are required. Thus our method will be a key technology to develop faster genome mapping software.