Abstract
The emerging field of synthetic biology moves beyond conventional genetic manipulation to construct novel life forms which do not originate in nature. We explore the problem of designing the provably shortest genomic sequence to encode a given set of genes by exploiting alternate reading frames. We present an algorithm for designing the shortest DNA sequence simultaneously encoding two given amino acid sequences. We show that the coding sequence of naturally occurring pairs of overlapping genes approach maximum compression. We also investigate the impact of alternate coding matrices on overlapping sequence design. Finally, we discuss an interesting application for overlapping gene design, namely the interleaving of an antibiotic resistance gene into a target gene inserted into a virus or plasmid for amplification.
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Acknowledgments
This research was partially supported by NSF grants EIA-0325123 and DBI-0444815. We thank Eckard Wimmer for his interest and support. We also thank Chen Zhao, Huei-Chi Chen, and Rahul Sinha for discussions and contributions to this research.
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Wang, B., Papamichail, D., Mueller, S. et al. Two proteins for the price of one: the design of maximally compressed coding sequences. Nat Comput 6, 359–370 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-006-9031-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-006-9031-7