TopAbstract
Constant advances in DNA sequencing technologies are turning whole-genome sequencing into a routine procedure, resulting in massive amounts of data that need to be processed. Tens of gigabytes of data, in the form of short sequences (reads), need to be mapped back onto reference sequences, a few gigabases long. A first generation of short-read alignment algorithms successfully employed hash tables, and the current second generation uses the Burrows-Wheeler transform, further improving speed and memory footprint. These next-generation sequencing technologies allow researchers to characterise a bacterial genome, during a single experiment, at a moderate cost. In this article, as most of the bacterial chromosomes contain a circular DNA molecule, the authors present a new simple, yet efficient, sensitive and accurate algorithm, specifically designed for mapping millions of short reads to a genomic sequence with circular structure.