Trinucleotide k-circular codes I: Theory

A code X is (⩾k)-circular if every concatenation of words from X that admits, when read on a circle, more than one partition into words from X, must contain at least k+1 words. In other words, the reading frame retrieval is guaranteed for any concatenation of up to k words from X. A code that is (⩾k)-circular for all integers k is said to be circular. Any code is (⩾0)-circular and it turns out that a code of trinucleotides is circular as soon as it is (⩾4)-circular. A code is k-circular if it is (⩾k)-circular and not (⩾k+1)-circular. Due to the explosive combinatorics of trinucleotide k-circular codes, we developed three classes of algorithms based on: (i) the smallest directed cycles (directed girth) in graphs; (ii) the eigenvalues of matrices; and (iii) the files that incrementally save partial results. These different approaches also allow us to verify the computational results obtained. We determine here the growth functions of trinucleotide k-circular codes, k varying between 0 and 4, in the general case and in various particular cases: minimum, minimal, maximum, self-complementary k-, (k,k,k)- and self-complementary (k,k,k)-circular.