• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.251-260
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• 2006

Homology searching on the primary structure (i.e., amino acid arrangement) of protein sequences is an essential part in predicting the functions and evolutionary histories of proteins. However, proteins distant in an evolutionary history do not conserve amino acid residue arrangements, while preserving their structures. Therefore, homology searching on proteins' secondary structure is quite important in finding out distant homology. In this manuscript, we propose an indexing scheme for efficient approximate searching on the secondary structure of protein sequences which can be easily implemented in RDBMS. Exploiting the concept of clustering and lookahead, the proposed indexing scheme processes three types of secondary structure queries (i.e., exact match, range match, and wildcard match) very quickly. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we conducted extensive experiments using a set of actual protein sequences. CSI was proved to be faster than the existing indexing methods up to 6.3 times in exact match, 3.3 times in range match, and 1.5 times in wildcard match, respectively.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.9
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• pp.475-482
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• 2005

String data containing wildcard characters may represent certain patterns in texts. A subsumption relation between two patterns can be defined by a subset relation between sets of strings that match those patterns. Thus, the subsumption relation check is important to determine whether each pattern represents a set of strings without any overlap with another pattern. In this paper, we propose an effective algorithm that can determine subsumption relation between strings with wildcard characters. First, we consider a simple extension of the suffix tree algorithm so that it nay include wildcard characters and then we propose another method that checks the subsumption relation by dividing a suffix tree structure at each location of string data.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.263-275
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• 2005

In a large DNA database, indexing techniques are widely used for rapid approximate sequence searching. However, most indexing techniques require a space larger than original databases, and also suffer from difficulties in seamless integration with DBMS. In this paper, we suggest a space-efficient and disk-based indexing and query processing algorithm for approximate DNA sequence searching, specially exact match queries, wildcard match queries, and k-mismatch queries. Our indexing method places a sliding window at every possible location of a DNA sequence and extracts its signature by considering the occurrence frequency of each nucleotide. It then stores a set of signatures using a multi-dimensional index, such as R*-tree. Especially, by assigning a weight to each position of a window, it prevents signatures from being concentrated around a few spots in index space. Our query processing algorithm converts a query sequence into a multi-dimensional rectangle and searches the index for the signatures overlapped with the rectangle. The experiments with real biological data sets revealed that the proposed method is at least three times, twice, and several orders of magnitude faster than the suffix-tree-based method in exact match, wildcard match, and k- mismatch, respectively.