Question

In molecular biology, DNAs and proteins can be represented as a sequence of alphabets. DNA sequences consist of A, T, G, C representing nucleobases adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. Two sample DNA sequences GACGGATTAG and GATCGGAATAG. You are given two sequences query sequence and database sequence. You need to find the similarity between them. Similarity between sequences is the longest matching subsequence. This problem is similar to which of the problems from the explorations?

1) Knapsack
2) N-Queens
3) Longest Common Subsequence
4) Change Making Problem

Answer 1

The similarity problem between two DNA sequences, seeking the longest matching subsequence, is similar to the Longest Common Subsequence problem. This relates to sequence alignment used in molecular biology, often utilizing tools like BLAST for comparison and evolutionary inference.

Step-by-step explanation:

The problem of finding the similarity between two DNA sequences, where similarity is defined as the longest matching subsequence, resembles the Longest Common Subsequence problem in the field of computer science. This task is a part of sequence alignment, a method used in molecular biology to identify regions of similarity that may suggest conservation of function or structure.

Sequence alignments can be used to infer evolutionary relationships between sequences and to construct phylogenetic trees. Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is one commonly used program for conducting sequence alignment, which helps analyze and compare DNA or protein sequences to find high levels of similarity or homology, indicating possible relation or functional conservation.