Abstract

Two complementary goals of biological research are to understand how each organism works and how that relates to other organisms. Specifically, the function of all genes and non-genes (i.e., all the regions of a genome that do not code for any genes) of each organism and how its genes and non-genes compare with those of other organisms. The progress in DNA sequencing has generated large amounts of sequence data, and many computer programs have been developed to interpret these data, especially in identifying and analyzing the similarities among genes and genomes. Unfortunately, in the zeal of finding similarities, the differences among genes and genomes are often not just simply ignored, but intentionally masked, trimmed, or filtered. With the increase in the number of genes or organisms being compared, the deleted data increase exponentially.

Keywords: Genome; DNA sequencing; Mutations; Processing; Organism