Genomic Problems Involving Copy Number Profiles: Complexity and Algorithms

Abstract

Recently, due to the genomic sequence analysis in several types of cancer, the genomic data based on copy number profiles (CNP for short) are getting more and more popular. A CNP is a vector where each component is a non-negative integer representing the number of copies of a specific gene or segment of interest. The motivation is that in the late stage of certain types of cancer, the genomes are progressing rapidly by segmental duplications and deletions hence obtaining the exact sequences is becoming more difficult. Instead, in this case, the number of copies of important genes can be predicted from expression analysis and carries important biological information. Therefore, a lot of research have been started to analyze the genomic data represented in CNP's.