Sequence to Graph Alignment Using Gap-Sensitive Co-linear Chaining

Abstract

Co-linear chaining is a widely used technique in sequence alignment tools that follow seed-filter-extend methodology. It is a mathematically rigorous approach to combine short exact matches. For co-linear chaining between two sequences, efficient subquadratic-time chaining algorithms are well-known for linear, concave and convex gap cost functions [Eppstein et al. JACM’92]. However, develo** extensions of chaining algorithms for directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) has been challenging. Recently, a new sparse dynamic programming framework was introduced that exploits small path cover of pangenome reference DAGs, and enables efficient chaining [Makinen et al. TALG’19, RECOMB’18]. However, the underlying problem formulation did not consider gap cost which makes chaining less effective in practice. To address this, we develop novel problem formulations and optimal chaining algorithms that support a variety of gap cost functions. We demonstrate empirically the ability of our provably-good chaining implementation to align long reads more precisely in comparison to existing aligners. For map** simulated long reads from human genome to a pangenome DAG of 95 human haplotypes, we achieve $98.7\%$ precision while leaving $<2\%$ reads unmapped.

Implementation: https://github.com/at-cg/minichain.