Engineering in Genomics Combinatorial Methods for DNA Physical Mapping
A. Pevzner · 1994
ike cartographers mapping the ancient world, biologists over the past three decades have been laboriously charting human DNA. The aim is to position genes, markers and other milestones on the various chromosomes to understand how the genetic machinery works. The problem frequently might be formulated as recovering positions of points when only some pairwise distances between points are known. Various aspects of DNA cartography drew the attention of many mathematicians and computer scientists and dozens of algorithms and software implementations for DNA physical mapping are known. However, they are still far from being perfect for biologists. Hamilton Smith discovered in 1970 that the restriction enzyme Hind11 cleaves DNA molecules at every occurrence of a sequence GTGCAC or GTTAAC. Since that time, physical maps presenting a DNA molecule with the points of cleavage (sites) by restriction