Micron Technology, Inc.
Hardware acceleration of short read mapping for genomic and other types of analyses

Abstract:

A scalable FPGA-based solution to the short read mapping problem in DNA sequencing is disclosed which greatly accelerates the task of aligning short length reads to a known reference genome. A representative system comprises one or more memory circuits storing a plurality of short reads and a reference genome sequence; and one or more field programmable gate arrays configured to select a short read; to extract a plurality of seeds from the short read, each seed comprising a genetic subsequence of the short read; for each seed, to determine at least one candidate alignment location (CAL) in the reference genome sequence to form a plurality of CALs; for each CAL, to determine a likelihood of the short read matching the reference genome sequence in the vicinity of the CAL; and to select one or more CALs having the currently greater likelihood of the short read matching the reference genome sequence.