Abstract
The emerging field of synthetic biology moves beyond conventional genetic manipulation to construct novel life forms which do not originate in nature. We explore the problem of designing the provably shortest genomic sequence to encode a given set of genes by exploiting alternate reading frames. We present an algorithm for designing the shortest DNA sequence simultaneously encoding two given amino acid sequences. We show that the coding sequence of naturally occurring pairs of overlapping genes approach maximum compression. We also investigate the impact of alternate coding matrices on overlapping sequence design. Finally, we discuss an interesting application for overlapping gene design, namely the interleaving of an antibiotic resistance gene into a target gene inserted into a virus or plasmid for amplification.
This research was partially supported by NSF grants EIA-0325123 and DBI-0444815.
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Wang, B., Papamichail, D., Mueller, S., Skiena, S. (2006). Two Proteins for the Price of One: The Design of Maximally Compressed Coding Sequences. In: Carbone, A., Pierce, N.A. (eds) DNA Computing. DNA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3892. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11753681_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11753681_31
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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