Graph-Based Representations for Supporting Genome Data Analysis and Visualization: Opportunities and Challenges

Genetics has known an extraordinary development in the last years, with a reduction of several orders of magnitude in the costs and the times required to obtain the sequence of nucleotides corresponding to a whole genome, leading to the availability of huge amounts of genomic data. While these data are essentially very long strings, several graph-based representations have been introduced to perform efficiently some operations on a single genome or on a set of related genomes. In this paper we will review the most important types of genetic graphs, together with the algorithmic challenges and open issues related to their use.