Multiple Genome Analytics Framework: The Case of All SARS-CoV-2 Complete Variants

TL;DR

The paper introduces a novel framework for efficient, large-scale analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, enabling rapid detection of patterns and repeats across thousands of variants with minimal computational resources.

Contribution

It presents a new data structure and algorithmic framework that can analyze multiple genomes simultaneously with O(nlogn) complexity, improving speed and resource efficiency.

Findings

Analyzed over 300,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes.

Detected all repeated patterns up to length 60 nucleotides.

Enabled various bioinformatics analyses like pattern detection and genome comparison.

Abstract

Pattern detection and string matching are fundamental problems in computer science and the accelerated expansion of bioinformatics and computational biology have made them a core topic for both disciplines. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made such problems more demanding with hundreds or thousands of new genome variants discovered every week, because of constant mutations, and there is a desperate need for fast and accurate analyses. The requirement for computational tools for genomic analyses, such as sequence alignment, is very important, although, in most cases the resources and computational power required are enormous. The presented Multiple Genome Analytics Framework combines data structures and algorithms, specifically built for text mining and pattern detection, that can help to efficiently address several computational biology and bioinformatics problems concurrently with minimal resources. A single execution of advanced algorithms, with space and time complexity O(nlogn), is enough to acquire knowledge on all repeated patterns that exist in multiple genome sequences and this information can be used from other meta-algorithms for further meta-analyses. The potential of the proposed framework is demonstrated with the analysis of more than 300,000 SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences and the detection of all repeated patterns with length up to 60 nucleotides in these sequences. These results have been used to provide answers to questions such as common patterns among all variants, sequence alignment, palindromes and tandem repeats detection, different organism genome comparisons, polymerase chain reaction primers detection, etc.