Improved lower bounds of DNA tags based on a modified genetic algorithm

PLoS One. 2015 Feb 18;10(2):e0110640. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0110640. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The well-known massively parallel sequencing method is efficient and it can obtain sequence data from multiple individual samples. In order to ensure that sequencing, replication, and oligonucleotide synthesis errors do not result in tags (or barcodes) that are unrecoverable or confused, the tag sequences should be abundant and sufficiently different. Recently, many design methods have been proposed for correcting errors in data using error-correcting codes. The existing tag sets contain small tag sequences, so we used a modified genetic algorithm to improve the lower bound of the tag sets in this study. Compared with previous research, our algorithm is effective for designing sets of DNA tags. Moreover, the GC content determined by existing methods includes an imprecise range. Thus, we improved the GC content determination method to obtain tag sets that control the GC content in a more precise range. Finally, previous studies have only considered perfect self-complementarity. Thus, we considered the crossover between different tags and introduced an improved constraint into the design of tag sets.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Base Composition
  • Base Pairing
  • DNA / chemistry
  • High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / methods*
  • Models, Genetic
  • Sequence Analysis, DNA / methods*

Substances

  • DNA

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (No. 61425002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61402066, 61402067), the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (No. IRT1109), the Program for Liaoning Innovative Research Team in University (No. LT2011018) and by the Program for Liaoning Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing and Network Technology in University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.