A Real-Time de novo DNA Sequencing Assembly Platform Based on an FPGA Implementation

This paper presents an FPGA based DNA comparison platform which can be run concurrently with the sensing phase of DNA sequencing and shortens the overall time needed for de novo DNA assembly. A hybrid overlap searching algorithm is applied which is scalable and can deal with incremental detection of new bases. To handle the incomplete data set which gradually increases during sequencing time, all-against-all comparisons are broken down into successive window-against-window comparison phases and executed using a novel dynamic suffix comparison algorithm combined with a partitioned dynamic programming method. The complete system has been designed to facilitate parallel processing in hardware, which allows real-time comparison and full scalability as well as a decrease in the number of computations required. A base pair comparison rate of 51.2 G/s is achieved when implemented on an FPGA with successful DNA comparison when using data sets from real genomes.