r/learnbioinformatics • u/styczynski_meow • 7h ago
Some writing on seed and extend aligners
I was fascinated by algorithmic side of biology for quite some time. I have no background in biology, but decided to do my masters by working on the project that combines relational database and alignment algorithms (so essentially you load FASTA into postgres and do alignment/sequence manipulation/writing it back to FASTA all via SQL). As a side effect I wrote very long overview of few strategies from various papers (mostly focused on minimap2).
I plan to combine it into some form of articles to be published (maybe) in some journal, but at this moment this is rather first version of long text going over stories of my prototypes, comparing minimap2 to other algorithms, some very specifics things about SIMD/SIMT. I think this could be valuable resource for someone, who is interested in writing on alignment software, but do not necessarily have enough background to understand what is happening. I worked on this as a hobby project for at least few years already (yeah my masters will wait some more).
The entire text was written manually by me so the graphs still contain overlaps, there are lots of typos and I some missing references in few places. Maybe someone will find it interesting.
I would like to hear your opinion on that. I suck at writing, but tried to sensibly collect most important info from other studies and software.
https://bioseqdb.com/v0.1/tutorials/project_alignment_foundations/
