On the Hardness of Sequence Alignment on De Bruijn Graphs

The problem of aligning a sequence to a walk in a labeled graph is of fundamental importance to Computational Biology. For an arbitrary graph $$ and a pattern P of length m, a lower bound based on the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis implies that an algorithm for finding a walk in G exactly matching P significantly faster than $$ time is unlikely. However, for many special graphs, such as de Bruijn graphs, the problem can be solved in linear time. For approximate matching, the picture is more complex. When edits (substitutions, insertions, and deletions) are only allowed to the pattern, or when the graph is acyclic, the problem is solvable in $$ time. When edits are allowed to arbitrary cyclic graphs, the problem becomes NP-complete, even on binary alphabets. Moreover, NP-completeness continues to hold even when edits are restricted to only substitutions. Despite the popularity of the de Bruijn graphs in Computational Biology, the complexity of approximate pattern matching on the de Bruijn graphs remained unknown. We investigate this problem and show that the properties that make the de Bruijn graphs amenable to efficient exact pattern matching do not extend to approximate matching, even when restricted to the substitutions only case with alphabet size four. Specifically, we prove that determining the existence of a matching walk in a de Bruijn graph is NP-complete when substitutions are allowed to the graph. We also demonstrate that an algorithm significantly faster than $$ is unlikely for the de Bruijn graphs in the case where substitutions are only allowed to the pattern. This stands in contrast to pattern-to-text matching where exact matching is solvable in linear time, such as on the de Bruijn graphs, but approximate matching under substitutions is solvable in subquadratic $$ time, where n is the text's length.