Alignment-free Genomic Analysis via a Big Data Spark Platform

Umberto Ferraro Petrillo, Francesco Palini, Giuseppe Cattaneo, Raffaele Giancarlo

Abstract: Alignment-free distance and similarity functions (AF functions, for short) are a well-established alternative to pairwise and multiple sequence alignments for many genomic, metagenomic and epigenomic tasks. Due to data-intensive applications, the computation of AF functions is a Big Data problem, with the recent literature indicating that the development of fast and scalable algorithms computing AF functions is a high-priority task. Somewhat surprisingly, despite the increasing popularity of Big Data technologies in computational biology, the development of a Big Data platform for those tasks has not been pursued, possibly due to its complexity.