[Biococoa-dev] BCSequenceCluster
Koen van der Drift
kvddrift at earthlink.net
Thu Oct 6 06:38:44 EDT 2005
On Oct 6, 2005, at 6:08 AM, Peter Schols wrote:
> Dear Koen and Charles,
>
> I think we have two options: we could either use the gap symbol to
> represent gaps. In that case, there is no need for an offset at
> all, since we can simply use the gap symbol, both at the beginning
> of the sequence and in the middle. This is definitely the easiest
> way. We could then have a BCSequenceGroup that consists of
> BCSequences of equal length containing gaps.
>
> The only problem I see with this option is that this design does
> not correspond to the real world: individual sequences don't have
> gaps / indels. Indels only exist when comparing (aligning)
> sequences. So from a framework-design point of view, gaps should be
> a property of BCSequenceGroups not a property of individual
> sequences. That brings us to the second option:
>
> Use BCSequenceGroups to add an array of offsets for every sequence.
> This option would correspond with the interface Koen has written.
> However, I don't see why we would need the representativeSequence.
> Unless you want this class to actually align a set of sequences
> itself, I think this representativeSequence is not necessary. I
> suppose that the BCSequenceGroup class will receive its already
> aligned sequences either from the I/O class of from a BCAligner
> class (that could be just a wrapper for existing CLI alignment
> apps). In this case, removing any sequence from the BCSequenceGroup
> should not affect the alignment so there is no need for a
> representativeSequence.
In the case where the input sequences are already aligned, we're
ready to go, I guess. Also note we already have a BCAlignment class
which we could use. However, I have not yet adapted that to use the
NSData structure. I didn't write the alignment code, and I don't want
to mess up someone elses work ;-)
I added the representative sequence after looking up some info about
sequence clusters (see eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Sequence_clustering). But if you suggest it is not needed in this
case, I'll be happy to remove it!
- Koen.
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